hey, I'm vaguely following the declarative Gradle project, mostly by lack of time. However, as a designer of the Micronaut Gradle plugins, I'm extremely interested in making sure that we can profit from this at some point in time. Some thoughts in thread.

Hey Cedric, hope you're doing well.

my first thought was "the dependency declarations should probably use version catalogs and not strings".

This is still an open area to investigate. We're intentionally avoiding any existing project extension right now. There's some overlap with version catalogs and how the declarative files work that may change how version catalogs are incorporated. A simple way to update/add dependencies is a must still.

in other words, today it's fairly simple for plugin authors to compose on top of other plugins, but it's more complicated to restrict the set of features they expose to these we want to support.

The way we're thinking this would work is you'd naturally get what you want. We have "software types" (this the thing you're building) and then some kind of mix-in to extend those software types. Let's say there's a

micronautLibrary

and

micronautApplication

and you can mix-in

graalvm

as an optional thing. In a build file, you can only access the software types, so a project building a micronautLibrary with graalvm could look like:

micronautLibrary {
    graalvm {
        // graal specific configuration
    }
}

This would imply the Micronaut library plugin would be applied as well as the graalvm companion plugin. None of the project extensions would be accessible from the build file, but they'd still be available through build logic.