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No, the

base

plugin is just for some conventions setup which is not necessary to use tasks. It creates things like

assemble

and

build

; and the

archives

configuration. See https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/base_plugin.html#base_plugin

right - but if your plugin creates files and you don’t apply the base plugin then you get no

clean

task and no

clean*

task rule.

I don't know if I would necessarily consider that buggy behavior, just not very user-friendly. My personal recommendation would be that any plugin should eventually apply the

base

plugin if it's creating tasks, including transitively through another plugin (e.g. for the

checkstyle

plugin, as long as it applies a JVM plugin or only adds tasks in response to one being applied, then there's no need to explicitly apply

base

.)

I would classify plugins in 2 kinds: those that define "project types" (

java-library

,

java-gradle-plugin

,

groovy

,

war

, etc.) should apply `base`; others are expected to be used with one of the former ones so they don't have to apply

base

themselves (unless they depend on those lifecycle tasks, but they could also react to the

base

plugin being applied by something/someone else)