"failOnError" property on Gradle tasks

Possibly, yet the wording should be tuned I think. E.g. failOnEmptySource or something similar instead of failOnError.

I like the way it's done by Ant: you make sure "failOnError" is on and then you know it takes care of anything that can go wrong. Being more specific may leave some error case unhandled, like empty disk, files that are too large to copy and god knows what else. It's like catching a SpecificException in a catch{ .. } block or just an Exception - I mostly prefer the second option.

But we may have them both!

Unless, of course, Gradle already handles and fails if anything goes wrong during the copy operation which leaves failOnEmptySource the only scenario left.