java - Gradle: How to exclude a particular package from a jar?

Question

We have a package that is related to some requirements that were removed, but we don't want to necessarily delete the code because there's a possibility it will be needed again in the future. So in our existing ant build, we've just excluded this package from being compiled in our jar. These classes do not compile due to the fact that we've also removed their dependencies, so they can't be included in the build.

I'm attempting to mimic that functionality in Gradle as follows:

jar {
    sourceSets.main.java.srcDirs = ['src', '../otherprojectdir/src']

    include (['com/ourcompany/somepackage/activityadapter/**',
                 ...
        'com/ourcompany/someotherpackage/**'])

    exclude(['com/ourcompany/someotherpackage/polling/**'])
}

Even with the exclude call above (and I've tried it without the square brackets as well), gradle is still attempting to compile the polling classes, which is causing compile failures. How do I prevent Gradle from attempting to compile that package?

Answer 1

This solution is valid if you don′t want to compile these packages, but if you want to compile them and exclude from your JAR you could use

// tag::jar[]
jar {
    exclude('mi/package/excluded/**')   
    exclude('mi/package/excluded2/**')  
}
// end::jar[]