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Hi folks. I'm refactoring some custom code generation tasks written by someone who didn't understand task outputs and cacheability.

Task A writes to `generated/com/acme/_generated` exclusively.

Task B's writes to a dynamic list of output directories like `generated/com/...` and `generated/foo/...`. But when the output contains `generated/com`, we have a conflict with Task A and caching is disabled due to overlapping outputs.

What I'd like to do is configure outputs for Task B to say it outputs to `generated/com/... excluding generated/com/acme/_generated` ... I doubt this is possible though.

Any ideas?

I think a cleaner pattern is to have Task A write to something like `taskA/generated/com/acme/_generated`, and Task B write to `taskB/generated/com`, then have a sync task that combines the output beneath `generated/`

Yes, I was thinking the same thing.  Have purely isolated outputs for A and B, then use Sync (maybe with some `preserve` patterns) to merge back to the destination.

Ooh I can also set the duplicatesStrategy to FAIL (at least when testing) - that will ensure  nothing is silently overwritten

Imho you should never set *any* duplicates strategy.
Not setting is also failing, so if setting that only to fail but never to anything else.
I have not yet seen a single use-case where setting one was not symptom treatment where better the reason is fixed.

Regarding copying together, why do you need that?
Just make sure the tasks generate to dedicated output directories and configure *the tasks* (or a provider thereof) as `srcDir`, then every task that properly requests sources like source jar, compilation, static code analyzer, ..... will get the sources wherever they were generated to and also have the necessary task dependency automatically as it should be. :slightly_smiling_face:

I agree with the copying together - unfortunately it's a legacy enterprise product and changing the structure around would have consequences beyond just the build process itself. So the `Sync` task is a good workaround.

Thinking about DuplicatesStrategy, I think I _definitely_ want it to fail while I'm testing this.

As I said, imho you definitely always want it to fail :slightly_smiling_face:

Yes, ah I see now.  Fail is the default, yes?

The default is fail and suggest to set any.

So yeah, set FAIL everwhere that noone gets the idea to set anything else :smile: