Gradle build doing nothing on WSL - kotlin

Question

I'm writing a Kotlin program, and using Gradle as the build system, as is customary in that language. I usually work on Windows, but it's time to start testing on Linux, so using WSL for that. Installed Gradle, cloned a copy of my code in WSL...
(base) a#DESKTOP-4B7M920:~/ayane$ gradle -version
WARNING: An illegal reflective access operation has occurred
WARNING: Illegal reflective access by org.codehaus.groovy.reflection.CachedClass (file:/usr/share/java/groovy-all.jar) to method java.lang.Object.finalize()
WARNING: Please consider reporting this to the maintainers of org.codehaus.groovy.reflection.CachedClass
WARNING: Use --illegal-access=warn to enable warnings of further illegal reflective access operations
WARNING: All illegal access operations will be denied in a future release
------------------------------------------------------------
Gradle 4.4.1
------------------------------------------------------------
Build time: 2012-12-21 00:00:00 UTC
Revision: none
Groovy: 2.4.16
Ant: Apache Ant(TM) version 1.10.5 compiled on March 28 2019
JVM: 11.0.7 (Ubuntu 11.0.7+10-post-Ubuntu-2ubuntu218.04)
So far so good, that warning happens sometimes, doesn't seem to portend immediate trouble.
This is my build file, that works on Windows:
(base) a#DESKTOP-4B7M920:~/ayane$ cat build.gradle.kts
plugins {
kotlin("jvm") version "1.3.72"
}
repositories {
jcenter()
}
dependencies {
implementation(kotlin("stdlib"))
testImplementation("org.junit.jupiter:junit-jupiter:5.6.2")
}
tasks.test {
useJUnitPlatform()
testLogging {
events("passed", "skipped", "failed")
}
}
Here goes.
(base) a#DESKTOP-4B7M920:~/ayane$ gradle build
> Task :buildEnvironment
------------------------------------------------------------
Root project
------------------------------------------------------------
classpath
No dependencies
BUILD SUCCESSFUL in 0s
1 actionable task: 1 executed
<-------------> 0% WAITING
Uh? I could understand if it threw an error because some prerequisite or other was unavailable. But no error, just nothing? What's going on?

Answer 1

You are using the newest version at this time of the Kotlin plugin for Gradle (1.3.72). However, you are using a really old version of Gradle (4.4.1). As you can read from the Kotlin documentation:
The Kotlin Gradle plugin 1.3.72 works with Gradle 4.9 and later.
It is unfortunate that the plugin doesn't check for this and give a more proper error message instead of just silently doing nothing. I guess you could create an issue for Jetbrains on this if you like.
Just as has been mentioned in the comment to your question, I also highly recommend using the wrapper. It ensures that the project is built with a particular declared version of Gradle that you, the build author, has decided on. Otherwise, you will have to document how to set up the environment correctly, including what version of Gradle to install.
Same thing goes for Java: be sure to clearly document which version is required or supported.
As for building in WSL, the only issue I've ever had with it was a remote build cache not working. This was because I had configured Git to checkout with POSIX line endings (LF) for source files, whereas the cache were populated on a Windows machine using CRLF line endings). It doesn't sound like you are using that feature, but other than that, everything has been working fine for me in WSL.