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I know you aren't meant to reference the rootProject's tasks in a convention plugin... what's the right way to do this?
```rootProject.tasks.named("dependencies") {
  dependsOn(tasks.named("dependencies"))
}```

That will break project isolation, I think the answer is, you shouldn’t do that in any way 

if you want to run the dependencies task for all projects, just use

```./gradlew dependencies```
instead of

```./gradlew :dependencies```

no, unfortunately `dependencies` doesn't work like other task names and is hard-coded to only run in the current subproject

you can create your own task instead,
```tasks.register("allDependencies") {
    allprojects { dependsOn("$path:dependencies") }
}```

Nice, thanks... is there any way to enforce an ordering?

I'm trying to get a nice diff output to see what dependencies are changing over time, but it's reordering the projects in the output as the deps change, so it's not really usable.

If you create a custom task per project, wouldn't it fix it too? So you don't need to depends on other project tasks

```allprojects {
    tasks.register("getDependencies) {
        dependsOn("$path:dependencies")
    }
}```

&gt; I'm trying to get a nice diff output to see what dependencies are changing over time, but it's reordering the projects in the output as the deps change, so it's not really usable.
Are you interested on the transitive dependencies too?

I don't know if using lock files can help with this as I haven't used them before, but checking the diff between two lock files maybe?

apply the <https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/project_report_plugin.html|project-report> plugin and use its file-based output instead of trying to parse gradle stdout

&gt; apply the project-report plugin and use its file-based output instead of trying to parse gradle stdout
Nice, thanks

&gt; Are you interested on the transitive dependencies too?
Yes, it's the result of using `module { replacedBy }` and things like that that I want to understand.

In the solutions above, better replace `allprojects { ... }` by `allprojects.forEach { ... }`. Otherwise you do cross-project configuration through cross-project configuration instead of just using a plain loop.