“@aar”在gradle“compile”任务中的含义是什么

Question

I'm new in gradle and cannot find any documentation about this feature.

All I noticed is that compile 'com.github.asne:asne-vk:0.2.1' caused some manifest merging problems (some grunting abot different minSdkVersions) and that compile 'com.github.asne:asne-vk:0.2.1@aar' works fine.

Answer 1

The AAR format

is the binary distribution of an Android Library Project.

As described here in the official Android Tools documentation .

In your case, when adding a compile dependency in an Android Gradle project, adding "@aar" means that you would like to fetch the @aar file and not a regular JAR file.

Answer 2

Actually that is not a classifier. Classifier (the term coming from Maven) refers to something else.

See http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/dependency_management.html#sec:how_to_declare_your_dependencies

Answer 3

This is an optional classifier which indicates which artifact should be downloaded. In this case aar instead of jar is chosen. Here You can find the docs. Search for classifier .