nmcpZipAggregation should log useful information to the console

[aSemy]

What feature do you want to see added?

I saw in the README I can run gradle nmcpZipAggregation to inspect the aggregated zip. When I run the task it completes successfully, but I don't see any more information.

As an advanced Gradle user I can intuit the right answer (it's somewhere in build/), but it would help me be more

I understand you wouldn't want nmcpZipAggregation to log something every time, since it's just a regular task. I have two suggestions:

1. Check if the user specifically requested the nmcpZipAggregation task. If yes, then log a message.
2. Create a dry-run mode (e.g. a 'nmcpDryRuntask, or a--dry-run` flag), that will run all tasks but log additional helpful messages to the console but skip actually uploading the files.
   Bonus: this could also perform other checks Validate pom + components properties #82

Upstream changes

No response

Are you interested in contributing this feature?

No response

[martinbonnin]

I understand the rationale but this belongs in Gradle IMO.

The jar task doesn't tell you to look for a jar in build/libs. assembleDebug doesn't tell you to look for an APK in build/outputs/whatever. I don't want every task out there to start adding logs for something that feels could be a Gradle feature.

[aSemy]

You're right, I wrote the ticket quickly and I don't think it reflects what I was actually asking for. I'll have another go.

What'd I'd like is a quick and easy way to verify that I've set up nmcp properly, without actually triggering the publication. I want to do it locally (because having to wait for CI can be slow).

It's nice that nmcp has a documented task for checking, but this is quite low-level and uses a task that isn't really supposed to be user-facing. So, my suggestion would be to add a way of dry-running nmcp to check I've configured everything properly.

[martinbonnin]

add a way of dry-running nmcp to check I've configured everything properly.

For that we would need to reverse engineer the checks that are made on the portal. I agree it'd be a great feature but it's not easy. There is a lot of behaviour there.

[aSemy]

Yeah, I don't mean a complete end-to-end run. Just a practice-run that does everything up to, but not including, actually uploading files.

[martinbonnin]

A lot of the things are not checked until actual upload: versions, checksums, signatures, artifacts names, pom metadata, etc... If we want those check to be the most useful, we should replicate the server side behaviour locally.

[martinbonnin]

There's now a dedicated docs page for debugging.

Adding more checks is on the TODO list. Closing this one in favour of #82