Gradle not working on Jigsaw

[Alan Bateman]

On 20/10/2016 08:25, Cédric Champeau wrote:

> Yes, Gradle, Groovy and other third party libraries Gradle uses are 
> broken since the changes to enforce strong encapsulation at runtime 
> (preventing calls to setAccessible). I already raised the concern 
> here, saying we have no clear idea of the impact of such a change at a 
> larger scale, but it totally broke our efforts, and that's kind of 
> depressing. We'll figure it out, I hope, but unfortunately we have no 
> bandwidth to do it now. We're gladly accepting pull requests, though :)
>
We are in no doubt that changing setAccessible will expose a lot of 
issues with existing code that uses it to get at non-public 
types/members in JDK classes (the rubygrapefruit library that Gradle 
uses is a good example as it seems to use setAccessible to get at the 
underlying collection of an unmodifable collection so that it can modify 
it).

In the original proposal (2015) then this method was changed so that it 
cannot be used to directly break into non-exported packages (you can't 
use it to get a private types of public types in sun.awt for example). 
That was an attempt to strike a balance and avoid too much disruption 
but it leaves the hole that is #AwkwardStrongEncapsulation. The latest 
proposal in the JSR is an attempt to address that issue but it does 
impact code that uses setAccessible to get at non-public types/members 
in java.* classes. I assume this is what Stephen is running into with 
his mail but I can't say for sure without seeing the exception.

Is the Gradle forum the best place to follow-up on these issues? (I 
can't tell from Stephen's mail if it's Gradle or Groovy here).

-Alan