One of my coworkers has enabled parallel tasks in his gradle config via

org.gradle.parallel=true.

This is fine for his normal workflow of "./gradlew dist" (dist is our custom task). But if he wants to "./gradlew clean dist", the two tasks now run simultaneously. How do I setup a dependency such that "dist" must follow "clean" if and only if "clean" requested?

the built-in

clean

tasks have destroyables registered so that Gradle knows to run them before tasks that produce those outputs

Thank you. That implies we have something else wrong since the ordering does not work. I will RTFM.

Anyway, that option only enables tasks from different projects to run in parallel if possible.

Our setup has over 200 subprojects. "dist" is a subproject.

But still, tasks of different projects will not run in parallel. So unless one project pollutes the build directory of another project, there should usually not be a problem.

I am 100% sure our build is a problem. Spent almost a year getting us from 6.0.1 to 8.11. There are likely a bunch of dependency/source/output declarations missing.