Support meta-annotations for includeAnnotationClasses & excludeAnnotationClasses

[mjustin]

It would be nice if includeAnnotationClasses & excludeAnnotationClasses supported meta-annotations.

Meta-annotations are handy when creating a hierarchy of annotations, some of which are often but not always grouped together.

Example

Given the following classes in package com.example:

@Target(ElementType.TYPE)
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface Flaky {
}

@Target(ElementType.TYPE)
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Flaky
public @interface IntegrationTest {
}

@IntegrationTest
public void MyIntegrationTest {
    @Test
    public void testTheThing() {
    // ...
   }
}

And given the following Gradle config:

plugins {
    id 'org.gradle.test-retry' version "${testRetry.version}"
}

test {
    retry {
        maxRetries = 3
        filter {
            getIncludeAnnotationClasses.add("com.example.Flaky")
        }
    }
}

I would want MyIntegrationTest to be retried on failure, since its @IntegrationTest is annotated with @Flaky.

Additional notes

JUnit 5 annotations can be used as meta-annotations:

JUnit Jupiter annotations can be used as meta-annotations. That means that you can define your own composed annotation that will automatically inherit the semantics of its meta-annotations.

A number of other frameworks (e.g. Spring) support meta-annotations as well.

I don't believe JUnit 4 or TestNG has support for meta-annotations.

The Groovy language has built-in support for meta-annotations, which means that Spock already gets meta-annotations for free. Additionally, JUnit 4 and TestNG tests written in Groovy would also get meta-annotations for free.