Why doesn't skip gradle use the gradlew wrapper?

[dfabulich]

skip gradle jumps through some hoops to find gradle on the path and run it with certain jvmArgs. That's normally what gradlew is for. But skip projects generated with skip init/skip create don't even have a gradlew script, and skip gradle won't try to use it, even if you provide your own gradlew wrapper.

Why is that? Would it be better (simpler?) if skip gradle just ran Android/gradlew instead of what it currently does?

[marcprux]

We generally prefer to use the system gradle because that lets us test with our officially supported Gradle version (that which is provided by the current Homebrew dependency version). The main reason is that although an app's own Android/settings.gradle.kts and Android/app/build.gradle.kts is fully under the control of the user, the Gradle projects that are automatically generated by the skipstone plugin for the dependent modules (SkipUI, SkipLib, etc.) aren't. We want to make sure that any changes that we make to those generated build files don't wind up causing incompatibilities for a project that may have overridden its own gradlew version.

That being said, I do see how a project might want to "lock in" a Gradle version so things don't change out from under it. Gradle has a frustrating tendency to break compatibility frequently and with little notice. So I'd be interested in ideas for having an option to use a local gradlew rather than the system installed Gradle.