POM relocation

Over the past several years, I’ve adopted Gradle as my go-to build tool That’s not strictly true; I’m learning to use sbt with my Scala projects. for any project that has a JVM component. There’s a simple reason why: Maven just works.

I’m not enamored of Groovy, really, but I’ve mostly reached the point where I can wrestle it into submission. I’ve written a couple of extensions that I find convenient, and there’s a really good extension for working with MarkLogic.

If you use Gradle for XML projects, the odds are good that you see this warning on every build:

POM relocation to an other version number is not fully supported in Gradle :
xml-apis:xml-apis:2.0.2 relocated to xml-apis:xml-apis:1.0.b2.
Please update your dependency to directly use the correct version
'xml-apis:xml-apis:1.0.b2'.
Resolution will only pick dependencies of the relocated element.
Artifacts and other metadata will be ignored.

You can ignore it, of course, but it irks me every time. I like my builds to be completely clean. Clean builds encourage good build hygiene and draw your attention to errors more quickly.

It’s doubly annoying because the xml-apis dependency isn’t one of mine. It’s a transitive dependency of some other package (which is probably in turn a transitive dependency of something else) way down the hierarchy from anything I’m using directly.

The underlying problem is, apparently, caused by the fact that the 2.0.2 version of xml-apis:xml-apis just points to version 1.0.b2 for its implementation and this “relocation” confuses Gradle. Frankly, it confuses me too, because there’s a 1.4.01 (sic) version of the APIs and I really don’t understand what’s going on with 2.0.2. But that’s a mystery for another day. (If anyone knows who’s responsible for xml-apis in Maven, I’d sure like to encourage them to sort out this versioning mess.)

The other day, I made a typo in my Gradle file and that sent me down a little web searching rabbit hole. Before I found my error and resurfaced, I stumbled across the following Gradle feature: you can declare various resolution strategies for dependencies. One of the strategies is force, as in:

configurations.all {
  resolutionStrategy {
    force 'xml-apis:xml-apis:1.4.01'
  }
}

Add that to your Gradle file to (1) tell Gradle to use the 1.4.01 version of xml-apis:xml-apis regardless of what’s in the dependency chain and (2) stop Gradle from giving that blasted relocation warning!

You’re welcome.