Dependency analysis: Why is there a special handling of kotlin-stdlib?

Could you please explain why the org.example.dependency-analysis-project.gradle.kts plugin needs to ignore kotlin-stdlib-jdk8?

Is it something particular to kotlin-stdlib or that may happen with other dependencies?

[jjohannes]

Thank you for the question. I have not looked at the kotlin branch of this repo for a while and updated it now.

The reason why this is (was) ignored is that the Kotlin plugin automatically adds the following dependency to any subproject it is applied to:

api("org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-stdlib:<<version-of-kotlin>>")
// Or 'api("org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-stdlib-jdk8:<<version-of-kotlin>>")' in earlier Kotlin version

If the dependency analysis plugin determines that the declaration is wrong, we can not influence that. That's why I ignored it. For example, the analysis result may say to move the dependency from api to implementation.

Another option is to tell the Kotlin plugin that it should not add the dependency. You can do that with a property in gradle.properties. (Note: I think it's bad Gradle plugin design from the Kotlin folks to do this via a property, it should be configurable on the kotlin {} plugin extension so we can do it in our convention plugins.)

kotlin.stdlib.default.dependency=false

Today I think, this is the better thing to do, to have full control over dependencies in all projects. Even if it means repeating a dependency declaration in every build.gradle.kts – see this change fea2d80.

See also Kotlin documentation:
https://kotlinlang.org/docs/gradle-configure-project.html#dependency-on-the-standard-library