This message was deleted.

That's just how Gradle works everywhere when using the Groovy DSL. If you just use

configurations { foo { ... } }

then you will create it if not present and configure it either way. I don't think you should do anything to prevent this. "Easiest" measure would be to get your users to use Kotlin DSL, as there the creating is forced explicit. :-D But to answer your question, I think it is

maybeCreate

.