IssueTracker

New projects created in Dolphin/Chipmunk use the following block in settings.gradle:

pluginManagement {
    repositories {
        gradlePluginPortal()
        google()
        mavenCentral()
    }
}

This is not very efficient as several repositories force Gradle to try all repositories in order until it finds a match. This can take a long time if the artifact is in the last repo so order is important. Each try is a network call which can be particularly slow.

We have heard reports that, for many people, the first experience of creating the first project in Studio can be slow. Therefore this is a something we should look at fixing (incrementally, there's no easy fix).

It is possible to add filtering to indicate what each repo includes or does not include. There are some limitations to the filtering, so we also need to look at how many artifacts are likely to be found in each repo. By far gradlePluginPortal will contain the fewest number of artifacts (only non-android plugins), and even though it does delegate to jcenter to find most things not in the actual portal, this is not viable long term, since jcenter is now read-only. In addition, a bit of benchmarking indicates that the Gradle portal, maybe because of the redirect to jcenter, is quite slow (slower than accessing jcenter directly).

The proposed new order and filtering is the following:

pluginManagement {
    repositories {
        google() {
            content {
                includeGroupByRegex "com\\.android.*"
                includeGroupByRegex "com\\.google.*"
                includeGroupByRegex "androidx.*"
            }
        }
        mavenCentral()
        gradlePluginPortal()
    }
}

Reasoning:

• with the usage of includeGroupByRegex only these artifacts, known to be there, will be searched in the google repo (*) so first place is the right location
• maven central is the catch-all really so most non google/android things will be found there.
• gradle plugin portal is then only hit for the actual plugins hosted there which are generally limited in number, reducing the impact due to its poor performance.

(*) note that there are many com.google.* artifact not on the google repo (but in the mavenCentral repo instead) but this block as about the plugin dependencies only so impact should be limited.

Also note that there are other packages in the google repo but they are for project dependencies rather than plugin dependencies so we don't need them there. I will file a separate bug on setting up filtering for the other repository list.

We should fix this in both Dolphin and CM.