from the userforum at: http://discuss.gradle.org/t/error-in-user-guide/8826

Chapter 44 of the user guide describes the Distribution plugin. It says this plugin adds the following tasks:

distZip
distTar
assembleDist
installDist
and that none of these tasks has dependencies on each other.

What I see, instead, is that the assembleDist task does not exist, while there is assembleMainDist. The latter task, also, depends on distZip and distTar (as I would expect...).

So: it seems like the "main" distribution is considered an "extra" distribution from the assembleDist task point of view. However, another inconsistency is that the documentation says that for each extra distribution, three tasks are added: ${distribution.name}DistZip, ${distribution.name}DistTar and install${distribution.name.capitalize()}Dist, but not assemble${distribution.name.capitalize()}Dist.