What will they want it for?

Because people want to say "gradle compile" when they want to compile their project.

Why do they want to just compile their project? What are they trying to achieve? The output of compile doesn't do anything useful on its own - you need to run some other task to get something useful. Wouldn't they just run that other task?

Because they just want to compile their project to see if it does. Ensure there are no compile errors in the code. Yes it does, it shows the code has no compilation errors. Why, they only want to check that the code compiles?

In the Java plugin, compile has gone, I have to say compileJava – why? It is a Java project, every aspect of the system, including the human, knows that when they compile they are going to compile Java so why compileJava and not compile? Also note that even though I have to say compileTestJava according to some error messages, compileTest still works fine (though it doesn't get documented by "gradle -t"). This is just inconsistent.

Also of course the functionality is actually there, there is a task called classes. Basically this just needs renaming to be compile. Though actually that is probably not the case. Gradle supports both noun-form and verb-form task names. The noun-form ones relates to the things that are created on the filestore, the verb-form ones relate to the actions the user might want to undertake. These two task sets need to be complete and consistent so that the users mental model is simple and straightforward.

It seems that although the tasks are called compileJava and compileGroovy, in the dependencies you stil use the "keyword" compile to provide the dependencies. There is a lack of consistency here that is annoying.

As announced on the Gradle blog we are planning to completely migrate issues from JIRA to GitHub.

We intend to prioritize issues that are actionable and impactful while working more closely with the community. Many of our JIRA issues are inactionable or irrelevant. We would like to request your help to ensure we can appropriately prioritize JIRA issues you’ve contributed to.

Please confirm that you still advocate for your JIRA issue before December 10th, 2016 by:

• Checking that your issues contain requisite context, impact, behaviors, and examples as described in our published guidelines.
• Leave a comment on the JIRA issue or open a new GitHub issue confirming that the above is complete.

We look forward to collaborating with you more closely on GitHub. Thank you for your contribution to Gradle!

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.