Getting a live view of environment variables (Gradle and JDK 9)

[Jochen Theodorou]

On 16.05.2017 19:46, Uwe Schindler wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I still don't understand why you need to change the environment variables of the actual process. I was talking with Rémi about that last week, and it's not obvious to me why you need that. Sure, it is easier to change the environment of the actual process and then spawn a child process for some non-java build tool like GCC or even another standalone java program with option fork=true. But: Why not use the ProcessBuilder API when spawning those childs? So you just add an "official" build API inside Gradle (an official one, documented that allows Gradle plugins to modify the environment variables for the current build running). If you missed to add such an API from the beginning (IMHO its essential for a build system like Gradle), then you now have to tell your users: "Sorry we did something wrong and all our (bad) hacks to allow you to change environment variables are no longer working in the future, so please change your code. We are so sorry!"

the daemon outlives the gradle call, and the next gradle call can be 
done in a changed environment, thus the need to update the daemon. 
Spawning a child process each time would be very bad for performance.

bye Jochen