Feature Request: Give advice about plugin usage.

[yogurtearl]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. I often want to know the minimal set of plugins that need to be applied to a given subproject. Specifically:

• does removing plugin X from subproject Y break anything in my build?
• what plugins can I remove from which subprojects?
• answer does this question of "why subproject x needs plugin y?"

Specifically, AGP, ksp, kapt and other plugins that can be heavy weight.

Describe the solution you'd like This might be impossible to do in the general case, and likely would need a way to define configurable logic per plugin to answer the question "is this plugin required for this subproject"

Maybe could detect if the plugin outputs nothing and doesn't generate any tasks, suggest that it may not be needed.

Also, could remove each thing in the plugins {...} block from each subproject one by one programmatically, and then run some configurable list of tasks to check if anything broke. This would probably be very slow and doesn't scale well.

[autonomousapps]

I think doing this generally is outside the scope of this plugin, at least for now. For specific use-cases, such as detecting that kapt is unused (which we already do), we can consider them on an individual basis.

In addition to kapt, the plugin also has some basic features for determining if AGP is needed. This is encapsulated in the "module advice" concept. I haven't had much user feedback on that feature, so I don't know what it needs to be "industry grade" yet.

ksp might be another interesting example. I don't have any personal experience with it, so couldn't say offhand how to detect if it's "used" or not.

As a way forward, I would suggest opening a new issue for each plugin you want to talk about. You could repurpose this issue for one of them, or leave this as-is for general discussion.