META-INF/versions/9/module-info.class: broken class file? (This feature requires ASM6)

Question

I'm having issues with Bouncycastle, which only arise when running the :lint task.

Generally it seems to be a Java 9 byte-code version 53.0 / ASM version conflict.

These are the dependencies:

// https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.bouncycastle
implementation "org.bouncycastle:bcprov-jdk15on:1.64"
implementation "org.bouncycastle:bcpkix-jdk15on:1.64"

Which cause the :lint task to throw processing errors:

> Task :mobile:lint
Error processing bcpkix-jdk15on-1.64.jar:META-INF/versions/9/module-info.class: broken class file? (This feature requires ASM6)
Error processing bcprov-jdk15on-1.64.jar:META-INF/versions/9/module-info.class: broken class file? (This feature requires ASM6)

META-INF/versions/9/module-info.class: broken class file? (This feature requires ASM6)

The same goes for:

// https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.google.code.gson/gson
implementation "com.google.code.gson:gson:2.8.6"

Since upgrading from 1.4.1 to 1.4.2-native-mt, it's the same again:

implementation "org.jetbrains.kotlinx:kotlinx-coroutines-android:1.4.2-native-mt"

kotlin-stdlib-1.4.0.jar:META-INF\versions\9\module-info.class: broken class file? (Module requires ASM6)

Answer 1

As already mentioned this was introduced in Java 9, that Android does not support. You could just use packagingOptions to remove those classes.

android {
    packagingOptions {
        exclude "**/module-info.class"
    }
}

This should not affect actual executed code and should also remove classes for lint checks as lint is working on bytecode.