I've written an article on the different terms used by Gradle and what they mean → https://ivan.canet.dev/blog/2026/03/02/gradle-vocabulary.html

In the dependsOn section, should:

If the

:other

task reruns,

:foo

will also rerun.

be

If the

:foo

task reruns,

:other

will also rerun.

No, :foo depends on :other, so it's the first one

It sounds like what you're saying is that if

foo

depends on

other

, and the user runs

./gradlew :foo :other

and then runs

./gradlew :other

that

:foo

will also execute in the second run.

That's a different thing. I'm saying that if you call the same command multiple times, and for some reason

:other

is not up-to-date, then

foo

won't be up-to-date either. If you have recommendations on how to clarify the text, I'm interested, it's hard to convey this concisely

Probably just flesh it out more, like lay out the scenario you're discussing (re-running

./gradlew :foo

) and that you're talking about up-to-date

You may want to link to https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/java_library_plugin.html#declarable_bucket_configurations or otherwise mention

compileOnlyApi

, I consider it quite important for proper use of annotations, esp.

@Nullable

This blog post is great!

Thanks @Eli Graber, I updated the article to clarify this. It should be live in a few minutes