We could have it but Adam expressed his opinion in the review that only http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/javadoc/org/gradle/tooling/GradleConnector.html#useGradleUserHomeDir(java.io.File) should be used. This way it is simpler to deduce what will be used by tooling API client. OTOH it shift the responsibility of handling gradle.user.home system property of GRADLE_USER_HOME env var to client code. Do we want to close this now?

If we change out mind we can revert https://github.com/gradle/gradle/commit/3a8ca3e97f94646399c154b7a9efcb3e340e97b7

Let's leave this issue open. My objection was to making these magic properties part of the cross-version API by implementing the handling in tooling API consumer. We can honour the magic properties, but we need to implement it in version-spectific way, by having the provider version involved in some way.

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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.