feat: (unsuccessful) upgrade to 3.11 gatling-gradle and project future 💔

[kkulak]

Description

Follow-up to the PR https://github.com/st-tech/gatling-operator/pull/120: the change introduces backward compatible upgrade to the gatling-gradle plugin 3.11+. IMHO we should simply support 3.11 syntax and make it clear, that starting from gatling-operator release x.y.z, only gradle plugin 3.11+ is supported, but I've encountered a much bigger problem while doing the upgrade 😭

gatling-operator expect that Gatling can accept gatling.core.directory.results param, but starting from version 3.11, it's not supported at all, without any alternatives:

• 3.10 supported params
• 3.11+ supported params

Probably we can deal with this problem somehow, but then I checked out what "features" are introduced by 3.12.x Gatling upgrade 😡 It has turned out that they intentionally dropped support for combing the results from multiple runs into one aggregated report, on which gatling-operator depends on. Please check out:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/78981709/how-to-combine-gatling-reports-from-multiple-machines
• https://github.com/gatling/gatling/issues/4591
• https://community.gatling.io/t/missing-command-line-options-in-gatling-3-11-bundles/9311

It seems that Gatling authors want to encourage the community to use Gatling Enterprise instead 😞

For us, it means that report aggregation & upload doesn't work anymore, and it can't be fixed. Report aggregation and remote upload are the main reasons people use gatling-operator, so I started wondering what the future holds for this project 💔

I hope I made a mistake somewhere @kane8n - please check it out carefully and come back to me, please.

Checklist

• [x] Tests have been added (if applicable, ie. when operator codes are added or modified)
• [x] Relevant docs have been added or modified (if applicable, ie. when new features are added or current features are modified)

Related issues:

• https://github.com/st-tech/gatling-operator/pull/120

[kane8n]

@kkulak Thank you for your detailed research! I did confirm that reports are only generated from a single log file in 3.12.

• ref: https://github.com/gatling/gatling/commit/2fb207dabf97a17e87d705991ca2145b6bd2b85a

First of all, support for 3.11 is a must, but we must also consider support for 3.12 and beyond. Just an idea, but we are considering implementing the process of running report generation after integrating the log files with gatling-operator. However, I am currently the only main maintainer of gatling-operator, so I am sorry, but this may take some time.

PS. Please wait a little longer for the PR merge here.