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Did you apply the foojay plugin to the project?

This is an external project that I do not control

I'm also building in an environment that would discourage downloading JDKs from afar

Apologies I misread your question at first. You could try running the gradlew -q javaToolchains command to see what jdks it can find but not sure if it'll hit that error too early to give any useful output or not.

Yeah, doing so would show the JDK that I used to run Gradle (assuming `-Porg.gradle.java.installations.auto-detect=false`).  My question is more about why 17 can't be used to satisfy 11 or 8

&gt; Gradle will sort all the JDK/JRE installations *matching the toolchain specification* of the build and will pick the first one. Sorting is done based on the following rules:

If you say you want an 8 toolchain, you can an 8 toolchain, not 8 or newer (which is not yet possible)

So the 17 toolchain is not in the list that is *thereafter* sorted by precedence

If you did not have specified a language version, but only a vendor, let's say Adoptium, and Gradle found Adoptium 8 and Adoptium 17 toolchains, then the 17 toolchain takes precedence

So `higher major versions take precedence over lower ones` as a rule could basically never be used, currently?   Or perhaps some vendors dont use major versions that match the JDK language version?  Maybe that's it...

Do not specify a language version but just a vendor as I said

Ok, I think I assumed that the language version was always in play as a filter criterion, hence the confusion over major version precedence.  Thanks

Then it can find multiple major version for that vendor and the rule will kick in

<https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/16256>