but the general cause is that classes loaded in separate classloaders are different even if they have the same name

ok. i am open to a different pattern. my use case is i have a task that aggregates data from files generated in one or more subprojects. so in my plugin, when it is applied to the subproject, it needs to make sure this aggregate task exists on the root project and add its files to the input file collection of that task

do you know of a good pattern for this?

oh actually in this case, its not data in files

it is data set on an Extension in each subproject

you'll have to put the data into files to do that…

you could potentially push the information into a build service instead, but you'd still have to deal with classpath

whats the best way to set the lazy file pattern on the root task? do i need a project.fileTree for that?

You can maybe use

taskGraph.whenReady

to validate whether the plugin is also applied to the root project and error out if it is not, to inform the user he should apply it there if that is really your hard requirement

Thank you both