Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am thrilled about this as well. Most of my projects right now have had all of their Vagrant plugin dependencies, including Vagrant itself, in the Gemfile because I wanted to make sure any developer could get a workable development environment without worrying too much about Vagrant versions. On one hand I like the fact that I can install up-to-date plugins this way, but on the other hand I just want it to work out…
I really like how Gradle has solved this problem. You check in the Gradle wrapper ( http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/gradle_wrapper.... ) into your source control (it's only 56K), and it automatically fetches Gradle for you if you don't have it. Updating the project's Gradle version is just a matter of changing one or two lines. It's cool to think that the only requirement for anybody to jump into a Gradl…
Sounds like a commercial. Many people have good things to say about Gradle's functionality, but too bad about the programming language I have to use with it, i.e. Groovy, at an old 1.x version, with a bloated grammar spec using an old 2.x version of Antlr, i.e. http://svn.codehaus.org/groovy/trunk/groovy/groovy-core/src/...
Too bad I can't use a language with a simplified easy-to-remember grammar, like Scala, to program Gradle.
The latest Gradle release notes http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/release-notes always mention both Groovy and Scala when describing how to build projects, but all the build script example code is in that Groovy language. Will Gradle ever expose an API so developers can choose to use the same language for the build scripts as they do for the projects they're building? Perhaps even ship Gradle with different build language options?