Gradle out of date error

[brittyazel]

Hello, thanks so much for creating this project. I've just downloaded the source, and was able to get the project building. However, when I try to generate an APK I get the error:

The project is using an unsupported version of Gradle.
Please point to a supported Gradle version in the project's Gradle settings or in the project's Gradle wrapper (if applicable.)

Are there any plans to update to a more recent Gradle version? The one being used is considerably out of date and as such can't make use of any of the new features of Android Studio.

[brittyazel]

Hello, I made most of the necessary modifications to get the app building on modern Gradle. I tried to minimize my changes as much as possible, but I did have to work around a few issues.

I'm not sure if you want to see what changes I made for your own reference, but here it is:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Engagement/Events/connfa/connfa-android

I read elsewhere that you guys don't really like merge requests, so I'll just let you cherrypick (or not) whatever you like 😋

[idimopoulos]

@brittyazel there are multiple reasons for the merge requests not going through probably. The connfa system is comprised by 4 applications that should all move forward at the same time as they are dependant. If you check #37 (comment) you will note that they already tried this once and started the v2 but apparently got off rails quite quickly. The current version is something they want to keep clean and working.
If they go with cherry-picking your commits (as I did) it means that they will have to understand the changes and maintain them (as it is their repo) and that would certainly require funding for OS that not everyone would like to give that simply.
Not to mention that they are offering it probably as paid service and they need to have a stable version.
I mean, I do understand them in terms of taking a risk to accept a PR. Because even if the PR is OK, a possible follow up issue might not be that easy to fix.
Anyway, the updates to some packages is really well done. It benefited my case as well in
https://github.com/idimopoulos/connfa-android (branch cest2019) as well.

[brittyazel]

Very true. Unfortunately we've made a ton of modifications for our use-case, and I'm not really sure how that would work with a merge request. Our code is super streamlined now though, and totally compliant with modern Android standards. Mostly we just cleaned up, refactor, and updated the codebase, but we did pretty throroughly rework the Twitter and GMaps integration. We also changed the UI a bit to be more consistent.

I'd love to see our changes merged back in. I get that they're a company and need it to be stable, but with us they have the backing of a large Foundation that's willing to help. I'd hate for our fork to never get upstreamed 😔

[brittyazel]

@idimopolous we also added in a lot of work to have full RTL support. We also removed the need for quite a few of the dependencies by using native Android functions, particularly we got rid of ParallaxScroll for NestedScrollView. I think it looks better also

[idimopoulos]

@brittyazel I have seen the commits but I could not work on it as it is for a side project and my main work blocks me right now. I will check again over the weekend unfortunately. I still need to do some updates whatsoever.