Clean up gradle files

[TacoTheDank]

I stumbled across this app on IzzySoft's F-Droid repo and found some things that I think can be improved.

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1st commit

• Delete unnecessary files (that don't need to be tracked by Git)

2nd commit

• Update gradle wrapper to 7.4.2 using Git Bash

3rd commit

• Clean up gradle deprecations
• Move versioning from manifest into gradle
• Added debug suffix to debug variant (for easier testing)
• Clean up outdated proguard rules, only use -dontobfuscate
• Compile on JDK 11 (supported because of Android Gradle Plugin 7.x and up)
• Exclude unneeded META-INF packaging, which will shrink the app a tiny bit
• Rearrange dependencies and clean up duplicates (there were four instances of core-ktx!)
• Update Android Gradle Plugin 7.1.3 -> 7.2.1 (changelog)

4th commit

• Remove MultiDex (this is only necessary for versions below Lollipop, which the app doesn't support)

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Thanks!

[ericberman]

Thanks. I'm going to have to dive in a bit on this because when I try to build your branch, it's not finding SwipeRefreshLayout, and thus isn't building. Were you able to build this without errors?

[TacoTheDank]

Oh, interesting. The only error I got was the missing googleApi key. The missing swiperefreshlayout is a simple fix, though. I'll fix that.

[ericberman]

No worries - I'm actually manually doing a bunch of these changes (Thanks!) on my branch because there are other incompatibilities besides swipe-to-refresh - updating some of the other dependencies is breaking Kotlin in weird ways, such as giving me false-positive errors (e.g., I have an exhaustive when statement that it's telling me is...not exhaustive, I have a couple of places where it's expecting a non-null value and complaining when I pass it a value! i.e., with the "!" to assert non-null). If I don't update those dependencies, everything is fine, so I'm going to just do these incrementally.

The gradle updates may be the hardest piece for me to unpack, partly because android studio doesn't expose a bunch of these files.

[TacoTheDank]

Mm, alright. I fixed the SwipeRefreshLayout error (the dependency was missing).

[TacoTheDank]

Also, the command I ran was ./gradlew wrapper --gradle-version 7.4.2 --distribution-type bin in Git Bash. You can independently verify the integrity of these files by running this command on your own machine and then using a file comparison tool (like WinMerge for example) to compare the results between this PR and your machine. You could also just use a hash checker, as that would be easier.

The updated JAR's integrity can be verified through this as well: https://gradle.org/release-checksums/

[ericberman]

Hmm...

ericberman@EricbeMac MyFlightbookAndroid % ./gradlew wrapper --gradle-version 7.4.2 --distribution-type bin Gradle 7.3.3 requires Java 8 or later to run. You are currently using Java 7. ericberman@EricbeMac MyFlightbookAndroid %

Not quite sure how to upgrade to using Java 8, particularly since I'm all Kotlin now. Already running Gradle 7.3.3, so the error is confusing me even more...

[TacoTheDank]

@ericberman I have not received any such error on my machine. I looked it up though. Try going to File | Settings | Build, Execution, Deployment | Build Tools | Gradle on your Android Studio installation. You should have the JDK set to something that says 11 (or default). This may fix the issue. Also, make sure your Android Studio installation is updated.

[TacoTheDank]

Also, appreciate the partial merge, but it seems you still left out some important things. I'll update the PR.

[ericberman]

Oh, I'm not done. It's just incremental, and I'm making sure it still works at each stage. I've found that a few components break things if I upgrade; I don't want to be touching functional code for this. I have more to do to merge these tomorrow.

THANK-YOU so much both for doing this, and for helping me with the merge items!!

[ericberman]

Thank-you for this!!!