google errorprone java.lang.NoSuchMethodError - gradle

Question

We are facing a strange problem. We are using net.ltgt.errorprone, version (0.0.8), along with guava(version 21) and gradle(version 3.1). Everything was working fine till today's morning. But suddenly all developers started getting this error
[system.err] An exception has occurred in the compiler (1.8.0_162). Please file a bug against the Java compiler via the Java bug reporting page (http://bugreport.java.com) after checking the Bug Database (http://bugs.java.com) for duplicates. Include your program and the following diagnostic in your report. Thank you.
java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: com.google.common.base.Verify.verify(ZLjava/lang/String;Ljava/lang/Object;)V
at com.google.errorprone.ErrorProneAnalyzer.finished(ErrorProneAnalyzer.java:132)
We searched through internet, most of the solutions are related to guava, but there was no change in guava version or
errorprone or gradle since a long time. We tried running old code also, getting the same error. We are unable to understand root cause of the problem. Did anyone face the same problem?

Answer 1

com.google.collections:google-collections was renamed to com.google.guava:guava which is really annoying and can often lead to two versions of the library on the classpath.
Here's how I'd diagnose the problem
Run gradle dependencies in the "broken" build
Go back in history in source control (git?) until you have a working version
Run gradle dependencies in the "working" build
Look for differences in versions of com.google.collections:google-collections
Look for differences in versions of com.google.guava:guava
See here in the Gradle docs where guava rename is discussed
You might need to add this to build.gradle
dependencies {
modules {
module("com.google.collections:google-collections") {
replacedBy("com.google.guava:guava", "google-collections is now part of Guava")
}
}
}

Answer 2

A new version(2.3.0) of errorprone was released, this broke our build.
We find out the dependency using this command
./gradlew -q dependencyInsight --configuration errorprone --dependency error_prone_core
This clearly showed that latest version is being used. We fixed it by using a last workable version forcefully. Following lines were added to build.gradle file
configurations.all {
resolutionStrategy {
force 'com.google.errorprone:error_prone_core:2.2.0'
}
}