Not fail with NullPointerException on trying to run Spock with unsupported Groovy version in IDEA

[szpak]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

Currently, a build (compilation) with incompatible Spock and Groovy version fails in IDEA with:

Groovyc: While compiling [tests of spock2-groovy4-gradle.test]: Could not instantiate global transform class org.spockframework.compiler.SpockTransform specified at jar:file:/home/foobar/.m2/repository/org/spockframework/spock-core/2.0-groovy-3.0/spock-core-2.0-groovy-3.0.jar!/META-INF/services/org.codehaus.groovy.transform.ASTTransformation because of exception java.lang.NullPointerException

With a newer Java version the exception (NPE) is more verbose:

Groovyc: While compiling [tests of spock2-groovy4-gradle.test]: Could not instantiate global transform class org.spockframework.compiler.SpockTransform specified at jar:file:/home/foobar/.m2/repository/org/spockframework/spock-core/2.0-groovy-3.0/spock-core-2.0-groovy-3.0.jar!/META-INF/services/org.codehaus.groovy.transform.ASTTransformation because of exception java.lang.NullPointerException: Cannot invoke "java.net.URL.toString()" because the return value of "java.security.CodeSource.getLocation()" is null

It holds also with spock-2.0-groovy-2.5 and Groovy 3.0. The problem is no location returned for CodeSource in:

spock/spock-core/src/main/java/org/spockframework/util/GroovyReleaseInfo.java

Lines 20 to 27 in d222bd2

	public class GroovyReleaseInfo {
	public static VersionNumber getVersion() {
	return VersionNumber.parse(ReleaseInfo.getVersion());
	}
	public static String getArtifactPath() {
	return GroovyObject.class.getProtectionDomain().getCodeSource().getLocation().toString();
	}

Describe the solution you'd like

Some of:

1. Explain why Idea do that and report a bug.
2. Find a "better" way to get JAR location.
3. Be more resilient to the unexpected exceptions to show the intended error message about incompatibilities (even in a reduced form) instead of NPE.

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

The problem seems to occur only in IDEA with Maven projects and Gradle projects with "build and run" switched to Idea (instead of Gradle).

[szpak]

I reported the problem in IDEA:
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-287643

And also a related limitation - unable to pass system properties to groovyc:
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-287642
(and a feature request in Groovy itself to mitigate limitations in Idea - https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/GROOVY-10468)

[leonard84]

@szpak is there something that Spock can do, it sounds like an intellij problem?

[szpak]

It is an Idea problem, but we would catch handle exceptions and display a regular error message just with "unknown path" for the artifacts (point 3).

[leonard84]

I added some basic resiliency in b218847