René's URL Explorer Experiment

{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","headline":"Future of ament_build_type_gradle","articleBody":"As I understand it, `ament_tools` is deprecated having been replaced by `colcon` as the build tool for ROS distros newer than Bouncy. Further, `ament_build_type_gradle` depends on `ament_tools`. I'm opening this issue to start a discussion about how to proceed for later ROS releases (e.g. Dashing).\r\n\r\nIf I ignore `ament_build_type_gradle`, I'm able to build ROS 2 Dashing with Java support, except some runtime environment information is missing for gradle packages (e.g. `CLASSPATH`, `AMENT_PREFIX_PATH`) and the packages are not registered with the ament index. My main question is where should these things be handled?\r\n\r\nShould we keep the logic in `ament_build_type_gradle` and refactor so it doesn't use `ament_tools`?\r\nOr perhaps we can move all of the functionality into [ament_gradle_plugin](https://github.com/esteve/ament_gradle_plugin)? \r\nIt seems like what we want is a new package `ament_index_java` (similar to the [C++ and Python packages](https://github.com/ament/ament_index)) that provides helpers for registering/querying entries in the ament index. Then this new Java API can be called from `ament_gradle_plugin` or directly by the gradle package.\r\n\r\nI'm new to gradle, so I'm still doing some reading and experimenting.","author":{"url":"https://github.com/jacobperron","@type":"Person","name":"jacobperron"},"datePublished":"2019-10-09T03:27:18.000Z","interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":"https://schema.org/CommentAction","userInteractionCount":5},"url":"https://github.com/9/ament_java/issues/9"}