Hello Henning,
the reason why the task is considered up-to-date is, that there is nothing to copy. Your task declaration copies everything IN the '/dirContainingEmptyDir' directory, not the directory itself.

cheers,
René

Hi Rene,
yes, the directory '/dirContainingEmptyDir' itself should not be zipped- but all contents of '/dirContainingEmptyDir' should be zipped. But if the only contents is an empty directory, then this content is not zipped.

To clarify, in my example I have the following files:

• /dirContainingEmptyDir [directory]
• /dirContainingEmptyDir/emptyDir [directory]

Now I would expect that the task creates a Zip file that contains the directory 'emptyDir' - but this does not happen because the task is considered up-to-date.

If I add a file 'test.txt' to the directory 'dirContainingEmptyDir', then everything is fine (the resulting Zip file then contains both the file 'test.txt' and the empty directory 'emptyDir').

Cheers,
Henning

appears to be fixed by https://github.com/gradle/gradle/commit/db753ed6 and https://github.com/gradle/gradle/commit/afcbb6a9 , will investigate later

I checked if the changes for Gradle 2.9 would make this work. There is no change for Gradle 2.9 . What made me think that this could be fixed was this issue referenced in the source code, in a test that started failing after I made the changes I mentioned in my previous comment.

I checked if it would be possible to override the getSource method of the AbstractCopyTask class. That has the annotation "SkipWhenEmpty". However it's not possible to prevent using that annotation in a subclass because of the behaviour in AnnotationProcessingTaskFactory.Validator.attachActions, which always scans all annotations of superclasses regardless if the method was overridden in a subclass.

There is a workaround in https://discuss.gradle.org/t/up-to-date-for-empty-inputs/9967/2

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