Adding SpotBugs causes JavaCC to fail about spotbugs-gradle-plugin

[KengoTODA]

Could you tell us which kind of failure it has? Is it not reasonable (e.g. generated code by JavaCC really has problem)?

[thpr]

It fails after hundreds of errors. Things like: "error: package pcgen.base.util does not exist"
...which is complaining about "import pcgen.base.util.TypedKey;"

The thing is, these are very real packages, and as I stated above, this all compiles without SpotBugs enabled.

This code has run well for a long time... over 100 versions over years. Those packages and classes the compileJavaccJava task are complaining about are very real in a JAR library. So these are configuration issues, not real code issues.

What is so baffling to me is that solely adding the spotbugs id line to build.gradle triggers this new task (and I can't find any documentation of what that task is or does) and thus leads to this set of failures.

So:

• Is the compileJavaccJava task actually added by SpotBugs or is there some other side effect of adding SpotBugs that is unclear?
• What is compileJavaccJava doing that is needed?
• Does this new task try to compile code assuming it has no dependencies? If so, that is a problem...
• Why is compileJavaccJava not drawing on known information, such as the "compile group" dependencies?

[KengoTODA]

If you think generated code is working well, you don't care this problem so heavily. I recommend you to simply exclude generated classes from the target for SpotBugs.

I feel it's one of common patterns that generated code has problem (e.g. Lombok generates logger variable w/ bad naming) and static analysis needs to ignore them.

[KengoTODA]

Is the compileJavaccJava task actually added by SpotBugs or is there some other side effect of adding SpotBugs that is unclear?
What is compileJavaccJava doing that is needed?

compileJavaccJava is not added by SpotBugs, but added by gradle java plugin.

Does this new task try to compile code assuming it has no dependencies? If so, that is a problem...

It depends on your config. Use auxClasspath to provide path of dependencies.

[thpr]

If you think generated code is working well, you don't care this problem so heavily. I recommend you to simply exclude generated classes from the target for SpotBugs.

I'm still not sure we are discussing the same problem.

I am ignoring the generated code. The code which is triggering the error isn't generated code. I already have a suppressions.xml that ignores the generated code:

compileJavaccJava is not added by SpotBugs, but added by gradle java plugin.

...but where I'm confused is that Spotbugs is causing it to run. When I do a dry run without the id line for spotbugs, I get this:
:compileJjtree SKIPPED
:compileJavacc SKIPPED
:compileJava SKIPPED
:processResources SKIPPED
:classes SKIPPED
:jar SKIPPED
:assemble SKIPPED
:compileTestJava SKIPPED
:processTestResources SKIPPED
:testClasses SKIPPED
:test SKIPPED
:check SKIPPED
:build SKIPPED

When I do it with the id line for spotbugs added, I get this:
:compileJjtree SKIPPED
:compileJavacc SKIPPED
:compileJava SKIPPED
:processResources SKIPPED
:classes SKIPPED
:jar SKIPPED
:assemble SKIPPED
:compileJavaccJava SKIPPED
:processJavaccResources SKIPPED
:javaccClasses SKIPPED
:spotbugsJavacc SKIPPED
:spotbugsMain SKIPPED
:compileTestJava SKIPPED
:processTestResources SKIPPED
:testClasses SKIPPED
:spotbugsTest SKIPPED
:test SKIPPED
:check SKIPPED
:build SKIPPED

... so SpotBugs has added a number of steps (bolded), some of which are related to Javacc that are not necessary to the original build. I'm at a loss for why these were added?

[thpr]

adding "-x spotbugsJavacc" to my gradle command line at least gets me a workaround.

I'm still interested to know if there is a behavior/structure related to how Javacc and gradle are used that SpotBugs is expecting and not seeing in our setup.

[KengoTODA]

wmm, strange... I'm sure that the tasks with spotbugs prefix are generated by spotbugs-gradle-plugin,
But following three tasks should come from other place.

:compileJavaccJava SKIPPED
:processJavaccResources SKIPPED
:javaccClasses SKIPPED

I guess they are java plugin's sourceSet tasks.

[KengoTODA]

I'll close this inactive issue. If you could reproduce this with the latest release, please feel free to reopen.