Make robolectric-deps.properties public

[jylinv0]

Seems this properties file contains essential information that need to be passed from users if they don't have their custom properties files. Make it public so users can declare dependency on it.

[Bencodes]

This seems fine although i'm curious what information you need from the property.

[jylinv0]

To launch robolectric, android_local_test in rules_android project needs to pass robolectric-deps.properties so robolectric knows where needed jar file is located. Not passing jar location mapping would cause an error like java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Path is not a file: ./android-all-instrumented-7.0.0_r1-robolectric-r1-i4.jar.

Users can override the location of properties file used in android_local_test with their own, but by default android_local_test will pass the one embedded in @robolectric//bazel:android-all so it works out of box.

[utzcoz]

@jylinv0 Thanks for your contribution.

[utzcoz]

@jylinv0 @Bencodes What about writing some examples/documentation for this use-case? From my understanding, developers can use it to download android-all.jar based on their requirements in the codebase and use them directly to run Robolectric, like offline mode very much.

[Bencodes]

Here's an example of where it's being used https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_android/pull/200/files#diff-dd8fdb04166b7ed1296b63b21ebc3ad01b0f5ebf71c0919aae354eb6c73581b4R178

@utzcoz this use case seems specific to rules_android and it's android_local_test implementation. I can't imagine this being needed more broadly outside of rules_android.

@jylinv0 you can find the properties file in the runfiles like this https://github.com/Bencodes/rules_kotlin/blob/blee/fork/master-napt-1.8-rules-android-pre-alpha/kotlin/internal/jvm/kt_android_local_test_impl.bzl#L178-L183 without needing to depend on the properties file directly.

[utzcoz]

@Bencodes Thanks for clarifying it. The run file looks great enough to customize it.

[ted-xie]

I'd be curious to see how the approach in kt_android_local_test (that Ben linked) scales. It does a linear search of all runfiles until it finds the properties file. If you have a really big app where the test has a lot of runfiles, it might take a long time, and you're essentially at the mercy of your persistent storage I/O speed and latency.

Is it possible to get a new rules_robolectric release with this PR included?

[utzcoz]

@ted-xie Sorry, robolectric-bazel keeps the same release cycle with robolectric/robolectric. So this robolectric-bazel version will be released after robolectric/robolectric new version release, maybe 4.12.

[Bencodes]

We could follow a release versioning strategy like KSP for cases like these https://github.com/google/ksp. A simplified version could look like 4.11.1-1 where 4.11.1 tracks upstream Robolectric and -1 tracks minor fixes inside the Bazel rules.

[utzcoz]

It looks great to me. What do you think about it @hoisie @brettchabot ?

[utzcoz]

@Bencodes I created an issue to discuss the potential new release version rule separately. #95.