I recently ran into a problem with CI, where an upgrade to Gradle 5 in their containers broke all of my builds. It seemed like some of the nested dependencies weren’t being downloaded and therefore not found at compile time, so I was getting a ton of Java compilation errors:
package xxxxx does not exist.
My leading theory is this was a consequence of Gradle 5 separating out compile and runtime dependencies.
So, I suspect that some of my dependencies list their dependencies as runtime dependencies, which had previously been included at compilation time by default. However, with Gradle 5 not doing that anymore, the nested dependencies were not being downloaded at compile time and therefore missing. Since I don’t have control of these third-party libraries, I had to explicitly list the missing dependencies as my own compile dependencies to work around the compilation errors.