Feature request: "metadata-only" publishing

[martinbonnin]

Now that the Gradle Plugin Portal proxies MavenCentral, would it be possible to add a "metadata-only" mode to publishing plugins?

It would allow to get the SEO and discoverability of the Gradle Plugin Portal while consolidating the download stats in Maven Central. Since Maven Central is already required to host the plugin transitive dependencies, might as well go all way in and host everything there.

In addition to consolidated stats, I'm hoping this can also simplify the maintenance of plugins: only one repo to monitor for exploits/security, no need to tweak the exclusiveContents {} blocks in repositories, no risk of discrepencies, support for Maven Relocations, etc...

Thoughts?

[ov7a]

This is something we can consider, but we don't have the capacity to do it in the near future.