Android Build fails using Proguard and Gradle

Question

I have recently converted a project from eclipse/ant to using Android Studio/Gradle. My debug build works fine but when I attempt to do a release build with proguard enabled it fails with the following error

16:26:13.437 [ERROR] [system.err] Unexpected error while computing stack sizes:
16:26:13.438 [ERROR] [system.err]   Class       = [com/a/a/a/d/d]
16:26:13.438 [ERROR] [system.err]   Method      = [<clinit>()V]
16:26:13.438 [ERROR] [system.err]   Exception   = [java.lang.IllegalArgumentException] (Stack size becomes negative after instruction [143] swap in [com/a/a/a/d/d.<clinit>()V])

I have used the same proguard.txt for my eclipse project and it worked fine so it suggests there is some kind of problem with the Gradle Android plugin. Has anyone encountered a similar problem? My proguard config - http://pastebin.com/2gsNUmeD and full gradle output http://pastebin.com/TAvMUSrR

Answer 1

ProGuard should indeed behave identically in Ant, Eclipse, and Gradle. You should check if your builds use different versions of ProGuard. You can see the version in the console log. If you know which ProGuard jar is being used, you can also type java -jar proguard.jar to get the version.

The error message suggests a bug in ProGuard's optimization step. Hopefully the bug occurs in an older version and not in newer versions. You can then simply upgrade the jar. Otherwise, you can report it on ProGuard's bug tracker, preferably with sufficient information to reproduce the problem. As a workaround, you can disable optimization with the option -dontoptimize.