Consider Using Gradle Version Catalogs

[ccjernigan]

What is your feature request?
Use Gradle Version Catalogs to manage dependencies.

How would this feature help you?
This would leverage a standard way to manage dependency versions, which should make it easier for new contributors to understand how our project is set up. It also removes a plugin from the critical path of our build system.

Because Version Catalogs are an incubating feature, this is not necessarily an immediate feature request.

There are two different version catalog approaches, one using settings.gradle and the other using a toml file. It isn't clear which will ultimately be the right approach, although switching that should be relatively straightforward because the typesafe version accessors are still the same in the rest of the build scripts.