Signing plugin does not use configuration avoidance APIs and causes eager creation of tasks

[erdi]

For example, in Geb's build I'm using the following signing plugin configuration:

signing {
    ...
    publishing.publications.configureEach {
        sign(it)
    }
}

This causes the signing tasks for each of the publications to be created immediately and metadata file generation as well as pom file generation tasks to be created during configuration. You can see that for example signMainPublication tasks are created immediately in a build scan for running help task on geb/geb@e36e64d.

I would expect this plugin to be using configuration avoidance APIs given that any project publishing to Maven Central will most likely have it applied. The tasks eagerly created by signing plugin are the only ones which are outstanding to get Geb's build to not create any tasks during configuration when running help task.

[tresat]

It looks like the publishing plugin is eagerly configuring all publications, so configureEach doesn't result in any lazy behavior. See:

gradle/subprojects/publish/src/main/java/org/gradle/api/publish/plugins/PublishingPlugin.java

Line 85 in 2d0225d

extension.getPublications().all(publication -> {

[larsgrefer]

These lines seem to be the problem:

gradle/subprojects/signing/src/main/java/org/gradle/plugins/signing/SigningExtension.java

Line 413 in cdf577f

final Sign signTask = project.getTasks().create(determineSignTaskNameForPublication(publicationToSign), Sign.class, new Action<Sign>() {

gradle/subprojects/signing/src/main/java/org/gradle/plugins/signing/SigningExtension.java

Line 444 in cdf577f

Sign signTask = project.getTasks().create("sign" + capitalize(name), Sign.class, taskConfiguration);

Unfortunately, the fix won't be trivial, since the public sign(...) methods on SigningExtension return List<Sign> instead of List<TaskProvider<Sign>>

[aSemy]

I'm really struggling to use the signing plugin because it's very incompatible with configuration avoidance. Even plugins that try to improve it have issues vanniktech/gradle-maven-publish-plugin#259

Is there a workaround or alternative? I might try and re-implement it in my own project...