Gradle 8 - R file merging not working anymore?

Question

In my project I have defined many strings inside a core module. After upgrading to gradle 8 I see that I need to reference R files exactly now.

E.g. if I define a string inside my core module and want to access it from my main module (the main module includes the core module of course) I see following behaviour:

Before

I could access strings (and all other resources) from the core module inside the main module via com.my.package.main.R and com.my.package.core.R

After

Now I can only access the strings from the exact module anymore so I need to use com.my.package.core.R inside my main module to access strings from the core module...

The same happens for attributes from com.google.android.material.R and androidx.appcompat...

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Did I miss a migration step? Or should this really be like that?

Answer 1

With AGP 8 the default behaviour did change: See the option android.nonTransitiveRClass in https://developer.android.com/build/releases/gradle-plugin

android.nonTransitiveRClass

New default: true Old default: false

AGP 8.0 generates R classes for resources defined in the current module only.