That's how it's currently designed to work, although it would sometimes be useful if dependencies were rebound to the overwriting task.

This changed from 1.2 to 1.3 and blew our entire system out of the water. It should probably not work this way.

That's surprising. I don't think I've ever seen it rebind dependencies.

I've investigated this some more, and found the commit responsible for the changed behavior between 1.2 and 1.3. Bottom line is, it all depends on when the task dependency gets resolved, and it was never safe to rely on it being bound to the overwriting task. It would probably make a good feature, though.

As of today, the only way to make sure that task dependencies stay intact is to replace the task's actions, rather than the task itself. Of course this means that the task type can't be changed, but often that won't matter.

If you control the code that adds the task dependency, you can make sure that it gets resolved late by using a `String` (`foo.dependsOn("bar")`) rather than a `Task` (`foo.dependsOn(bar)`).

A workaround: http://forums.gradle.org/gradle/topics/overriding_the_test_task_in_gradle_versions_1_1_doesnt_work_as_expected

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