Support arbitrary report formatters for the PMD plugin

[slovdahl]

Expected Behavior

I would like to be able to configure the report formatter when running PMD to be codeclimate (and maybe sarif in the future if GitLab starts supporting it).

Current Behavior

Only the html and xml formatters can be explicitly enabled/disabled at the moment, and text / textcolor implicitly through pmd { consoleOutput = true }.

Context

We use GitLab and GitLab CI. Its code quality analysis supports the Code Climate format.

[slovdahl]

Implementing this does not seem to be that hard (for someone that has never touched the Gradle codebase but has a little bit of experience with Gradle plugins). I could try to give it a shot and provide a PR if there's a chance it will be accepted.

[eskatos]

This feature request is in the backlog of the relevant team but this area of Gradle is currently not a focus one so it might take a while before it gets implemented.

If you are interested in contributing to Gradle, this issue is actionable and ready for contribution but might be challenging for first time contributors.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for more information.

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Yes, if you are interested in contributing, please go ahead.

Also see

• Support SARIF format in Checkstyle plugin #21266
• sarif support for gradle checkstyle #21437

[slovdahl]

Thanks @eskatos, I opened #22979 as a starting point.

[MitchK]

Following, we would like to enable PMD as part of our GitLab CI pipeline, but we currently can't set the reporting format to codeclimate (which is supported by GitLab).