a group of us have committed to getting together and fixing this issue. Is it valuable to fix this issue alone, or does 494 really need to be part of a proper fix?
494 does not need to be part of the fix. I have changed the link type. As I understand 494, it would be part of the Gradle Gradle build itself.
Hi Gang, this work is complete, as is the general purpose Announce plugin. Twitter, Snarl, and Ubuntu notifications all work. The userguide was updated as well. We might work just a little bit more on the user guide to make it nicer. The pull request was sent from github: http://github.com/madmarkus/gradle
Contact hamletdrc@gmail.com if you need any changes or questions answered.
Growl is not yet supported because we do not have a Mac.
Is there anything we can do to make the patch merge easier?
Hi Hamlet,
one thing we have been discussing is a more general issue. What are the Gradle core plugins and what not. There are three categories of plugins
- Core (e.g. Java)
- Maintained by Gradle (e.g. Jetty)
- External
The announce plugins falls into the second category. The problem is that Gradle is not modularized yet. So at the moment we are just monolithic and don't distinguish between 1 and 2. Therefore we decided yesterday to merge the announce plugin into the core distribution for 0.9. In 1.0 we will modularize.
The other thing we have been discussing is extracting a messaging layer which would go into the gradle-core.jar. But we won't do this for 0.9 I think. So because of those discussions the merge got delayed. But we will merge it soon.
Thanks again for all your work 
I have reviewed the code, it looks good to me. I will merge it soon.
@Hans
IMO, plugins need to be easy to load and easy to find. Having to load plugins from all across of the Internet from URLs and such is a pain. I like what Griffon and Grails have done, where there is one plugin repository and many people can contribute to that central repo. Until this type of system exists, then I would keep putting the plugins into Gradle Core. I think we agree
@Hamlet I have merged the Announce plugin into a local branch. Everything is ready for committing it except that the SnarlTest is failing on my Ubuntu machine. Any ideas?
@Hans: Snarl is a Windows version of Mac's Growl, it won't work on Ubuntu.