Been looking at this in the context of #1540 and I don't think there is a good value to put in org.gradle.jvm.version?

If we really wanted to put something here, the best value is probably the minimum of all shadowed jars:

min(
  this-project jvmTarget, 
  lib1 org.gradle.jvm.version,
  lib2 org.gradle.jvm.version,
  ... 
)

Even that feels a bit wrong. If someone is using the fat jar as a compile dependency, only the public API surface needs to be say Java 8. Whether the shadowed libs are Java 11 or 17 doesn't really matter (see also gradle/gradle#33964).

But with the current Gradle behaviour, I guess we don't really have a choice if we also want to fix #1416

I'm afraid we should remove org.gradle.jvm.version, this is the least disruptive way to maintain compatibility in cases like #1540.

we should remove org.gradle.jvm.version

👍 This is fine by me. The more I think about this, the more I think the JVM target shouldn't be part of dependency resolution anyways