Syntax improvements in Convention Plugins

[Javernaut]

What I have done and why

• Enabled the type safe Version Catalog accessing in Convention plugins according to this solution;
• Created a handful of extension functions that make dependencies blocks in Convention plugins look cleaner.

Ultimately, the goal was to refactor this:

class AndroidHiltConventionPlugin : Plugin<Project> {
    override fun apply(target: Project) {
        with(target) {
            with(pluginManager) {
                apply("com.google.devtools.ksp")
                apply("dagger.hilt.android.plugin")
            }

            dependencies {
                "implementation"(libs.findLibrary("hilt.android").get())
                "ksp"(libs.findLibrary("hilt.compiler").get())
            }

        }
    }
}

into this:

class AndroidHiltConventionPlugin : Plugin<Project> {
    override fun apply(target: Project) {
        with(target) {
            with(pluginManager) {
                apply(libs.plugins.ksp)
                apply(libs.plugins.hilt)
            }

            dependencies {
                implementation(libs.hilt.android)
                ksp(libs.hilt.compiler)
            }
        }
    }
}

No behavioral changes. Purely syntactic polishing.

[SimonMarquis]

Hi @Javernaut and thanks for the PR, unfortunately this solution has already been discussed in this repository:

• https://github.com/android/nowinandroid/pull/318
• https://github.com/android/nowinandroid/pull/937

Thanks for the proposal! Closing at the moment as this is a workaround that we probably don't want to recommend broadly, and could be brittle with different versions of Gradle. Once Gradle has full support this would be great to add! https://github.com/android/nowinandroid/pull/318#issuecomment-1270143404