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I have spent one year taking part in a multi-team project to fix a build system, because everyone made their own little changes in Ant.

A chaos in a three site distributed system, with around 300 developers at its peak.

In this regard, Gradle is even worse than Ant in what concerns keeping a build infrastructure clean.

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Oddly enough, my experience was quite opposite of yours, but it sounds like the scope of your system might be a little larger than ours.

The key to cleanliness (from my perspective) was to create versioned plugins for any build functionality that was required in more than one subproject. This simple rule prevents spaghetti task dependencies and maintains sanity for everyone. It gives us the best of both worlds -- a little bit of flexibility when needed for one-offs, but then a well defined DSL via plugins for anything that is done more frequently.

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