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A `force` is a hammer, which is also purely local to the project being resolved. It will ignore anything else and is somehow subject to ordering issues. A `strictly` is a proper dependency version declaration, which is used during resolution as any other information. For example it will participate in conflict resolution and fail if it finds conflicting `strictly` clauses. Also it's _published_, which means that consumers will get the strictly.

In other words, `strictly` is a better designed solution for `force`.

this is in the context of an app, so I'm not concerned about publishing the information. Is there any performance impact? Right now we have a base plugin that's applied to every subproject in our project, so they all get the force rule. Would it make any measurable difference to replace that with a strictly constraint?

I suspect a `force` would be faster, but no numbers to back that statement.

although I'm wondering if this is on the order of milliseconds or microseconds or something. I know that AGP applies constraints from the runtime classpath to the compile classpath already, so our build is _chock full_ of constraints due to that

Gradle should really remove the `force` option. Every time I've asked I've been told not to use it

I'm not seeing a good reason _why_ tbh. Saying that constraints are "better designed" is nice, but not really compelling from an end-user perspective

it's like how the docs say you shouldn't use `getPlugins()` but instead `getPluginManager()` without any explanation why the latter should be preferred

I'm sorry I thought I was clear: `force` is a hammer which is inherently broken. Depending on when the force is seen first (when it's on a dependency), you get different results. When it's on a configuration, it doesn't propagate to consumers, which is, IMO, another reason to avoid it. So, prefer `strictly`. This is the only mechanism which is consistent and would give you better error messages in case of conflicts.

I hear you. Since we apply the force rules universally, I don't think we have the problem of consumers not seeing it. I agree that we should migrate. This is about prioritizing work

and also fully understanding the space for the inevitable questions when I _do_ make this change

Isn’t _force_ deprecated to indicate at least that is is to be fully replaced by _strictly_?

`force` is deprecated on an `ExternalDependency`, but not on a `ResolutionStrategy`.