OpenJFX 14, gradle

[Michael Zucchi]

Morning,

I'm trying to work on updating some java stuff as guix currently only 
has java12 which is  a year out of date and javafx8 which is ancient.  
Apart from openjdk 13 and 14 which is in motion I've started looking at 
openjfx 14.

But openjfx needs to be compiled with gradle 6 now - the openjfx8 
package uses ant but that is no longer an option (there's some netbeans 
ant files there but they seem non functional).  guix has no build-system 
gradle and looking at gradle I can't imagine there will ever be a 
source-bootstrapped package for it - the 6.0 distribution is 215 jar 
files, mostly external libraries, and it needs gradle to build (because 
of course it does).  I'm assuming that guix wouldn't accept using 
gradle-wrapper here which is the `supported' build mechanism for the 
openjfx project.

Partly out of curiosity and partly as a potential alternative I spent 
the weekend creating a single 1000 line gnu makefile to replace the 
>10kloc of gradle scripts and existing makefiles.  I haven't bothered 
with javafx.web or javafx-swt but otherwise it's complete and only 
requires antlr 4.7 at build time.  It uses gnu make features 
specifically and assumes a gnu environment, but it's 3-4x faster on my 
machine (amd r9-3900x).

Another alternative could be simple build script that forgoes 
incremental and parallel compilation support for a smaller script. I can 
possibly get that down to a few dozen lines of bash if i can utilise the 
existing makefiles.

Is either approach worth pursuing or is the whole idea a lost cause?

Regards,
 Michael