Patch alignment with only specifying group

[Vampire]

As far as I have seen the only way to align within patch { ... } is to list all modules that should be aligned explicitly, with optionally specifying a BOM if one exists.

If possible it would be very convenient being able to just specify the group, so that you could easily configure to align the version of all modules in the group org.bouncycastle for example.

[jjohannes]

Yes, this would be nice from a usability perspective.

A consideration why we did not add this feature until now was performance. If you don't know which modules you need to apply a rule to, you need to use all(...). And make a decision to modify metadata or not inside the rule.

That means that the rule will run for every module on you dependency graph. Which some very large builds may not "like". That's why we said we won't add any all(...) rules by default.

However, now that we have the patching DSL, I think we could add something like this to the DSL (but not use it inside the plugin ourselves):

jvmDependencyConflicts {
    patch {
        // align versions by using a group (without using a BOM) 
        alignWithGroup("<bom-coordinates>", "org.ow2.asm")
    }
}

And clarify the potential performance impact in the documentation if users decide to use it.

[Vampire]

Maybe two versions, one with bom, one without?