I think the severity can be reduced. I can use dependencyManagement in the pom.xml to compensate for the non-deterministic dependency order. Maven's transitive dependency conflict resolution strategy is pretty screwy anyway ("closest" to the root of the dependency tree, falling back to declaration order when conflict is at the same depth). Gradle's "take the higher version" is much clearer.

I've encountered a similar problem in 1.0-milestone-6. I can file a separate ticket if that's preferred. My project uses an external jar called "J-sky". We add functionality by building our own jar that masks certain classes. My a simplified version of my build looks like this:

dependencies {
  compile project(':JSky')
  compile files("../Libraries/jsky-science.jar")
}

The resulting (simplified) classpath looks like this:

  -classpath ./Libraries/jsky.jar:./JSky/build/libs/JSky.jar

I have not checked whether or not the order is deterministic or not. I would expect the order that I specify in 'dependencies' to propagate to my classpath. Can I do this?

I also posted this question here (http://forums.gradle.org/gradle/topics/how_do_i_control_the_order_of_compiletime_classpaths) sorry if I picked the wrong place.

I don't see jsky-science.jar anywhere in the class path you give.

This issue can also be titled as "POM Generation Randomly Orders the Dpendencies".

This randomness leads to unreproducibility, which is a severe bug for me.

I am maintaining some Debian packages that are built by Gradle, and Debian packages ususally includes POMs as metadata. Since Gradle projects does not use POMs, I generate them by using

pom {
  project {}
}.writeTo("${buildDir}/${project.name}.pom")

However the order of the dependencies in the POMs is different in each build. See the diffoscope report (the link may get out-of-date).

Currently I sort the dependencies after the MavenPom object is configured, but I hope that it can be solved upstream. The ordering logic seems to be done in the Maven project's ModelBase. If Gradle won't solve this, at least sort the dependencies during the writeTo() method.

I hope more people notice this issue.

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Thanks again for reporting this issue. We haven't heard back from you after our inquiry from November 15th. We are closing this issue now. Please create an issue on GitHub if you still feel passionate about getting it resolved.