GradleRunner withEnvironment() behaves differently in 8.8-rc-1

[staktrace]

Current Behavior

Setting GradleRunner.withEnvironment in a test for a gradle plugin seems to not set the environment variable for the gradle execution.

Expected Behavior

It should set the environment variable during the gradle execution as it did in 8.7 and previous versions

Context (optional)

We have a custom gradle plugin, and one of the tests for the plugin fails when run with gradle 8.8-rc-1.

Steps to Reproduce

https://github.com/staktrace/20240429-gradle-88rc1-envvar contains a minimal reproducible test case. Follow instructions in the README

Gradle version

8.8-rc-1

Gradle version that used to work

8.7

Build scan URL (optional)

https://scans.gradle.com/s/qt7d3u5jb4ywk/tests/overview

Your Environment (optional)

No response

[asodja]

This is an interesting consequence of fixing org.gradle.native handling.

Before 8.8 Gradle ignored org.gradle.native flag, which was basically a bug. That was fixed with #28021 in 8.8. Unfortunately our ForkingTestClassProcessor had also a performance optimization that disabed loading native services in workers, and it did that by setting org.gradle.native=false: that system property is not set anymore with #28401.
That worked fine before with Gradle <= 8.7, since Gradle <= 8.7 just ignored org.gradle.native flag.

But now if you use Gradle 8.7 wrapper that still sets org.gradle.native=false system property and you test Gradle 8.8-rc-1, 8.8-rc-1 build will correctly handle that flag and disable the native services -> so env. variables won't be passed in the build.

To fix that one of these options will work:

1. Use Gradle 8.8-rc-1 wrapper
2. Or do System.clearProperty("org.gradle.native") somewhere at the start of your test
3. Or do System.setProperty("org.gradle.native", "true") somewhere at the start of your test
4. Or in your build script do

tasks.withType<Test>().configureEach {
  systemProperty("org.gradle.native", true)
}

[staktrace]

Ah thank you for the explanation, that makes sense! For now we will set the property and presumably once we upgrade our main gradle version to 8.8 we can take it back out.

[eric-isakson]

Thanks for the workaround with setting org.gradle.native. Not sure if this is related but in 8.7 if the env var has the value of an empty string withEnvironment(Map.of("FOO",""), the environment var under the gradle runner will exist with an empty string value. In 8.8-rc-1, it will not be set so System.getenv("FOO") will return null