Gradle 6.5 Released, introducing experimental File-System Watching feature

June 2, Gradle released the latest version of the build tool “Gradle 6.5”.  It introduces an experimental opt-in File-System Watching feature, which improves build times.

Gradle is a JVM-based build management tool. It focuses on build automation and support for multi-lingual development. It supports languages and platforms like Java, Scala, Android, C/C++, and Groovy, and it can be used together with continuous integration (CI) like Eclipse, IntelliJ, and Jenkins.

Gradle 6.5 is the latest release of the version 5 series, first released in November 2019.

It introduces an experimental opt-in “File-System Watching” feature. When enabled, it allows in-memory watching of the file-system between builds. It makes it possible to significantly reduce the amount of disk I/O needed to determine what has been changed since the previous build, compared to polling the file system on each build. It can only be used on Windows, macOS, and Linux. This feature is planned to be enabled by default in the future.

It introduces version ordering, which supports dependency version conflict resolution. It can be used when deciding which versions are included in a version range. It will be enabled by default in v7.0, but it needs to be manually enabled in this version.

This release brings bug fixes and security enhancements. For example, it includes a fix for the vulnerability CVE-2020-13165, which affected the signed artifacts using the built-in gpg-agent plugin.

Gradle
https://gradle.org/