Planned Gradle 8 Support Deprecation

[hazendaz]

Planned Gradle 8 Support Deprecation

The SpotBugs Gradle Plugin currently supports both Gradle 8 and Gradle 9.

As part of ongoing modernization efforts, we plan for the upcoming spotbugs 5.0.0 release to require gradle plugin Gradle 9+ and drop Gradle 8 compatibility.

Why?

• Maintaining Gradle 8 compatibility increasingly constrains Kotlin and build tooling upgrades.
• Supporting older Gradle versions adds growing maintenance and CI complexity.
• Gradle 9 has been stable and widely available for some time.

What this means:

• The current spotbugs 4.9.x line will remain Gradle 8 compatible with this plugin.
• The upcoming spotbugs 4.10.x line will remain Gradle 8 compatible with this plugin.
• Starting with spotbugs 5.0.0, Gradle 9 or newer will be required with this plugin.

We are providing advance notice so users have ample time to plan migrations before the spotbugs 5.x release line begins. There is no set date currently with that and spotbugs 4.10.x is still unreleased so at a minimum this is at least 6 months from now.