build - Upgrade to Gradle 8

[usmansaleem]

PR description

build - Upgrade to Gradle 8.7
build - Upgrade web3j plugin to 4.11.3 (used in Acceptance tests)

Fixed Issue(s)

Thanks for sending a pull request! Have you done the following?

• Checked out our contribution guidelines?
• Considered documentation and added the doc-change-required label to this PR if updates are required.
• Considered the changelog and included an update if required.
• For database changes (e.g. KeyValueSegmentIdentifier) considered compatibility and performed forwards and backwards compatibility tests

Locally, you can run these tests to catch failures early:

• unit tests: ./gradlew build
• acceptance tests: ./gradlew acceptanceTest
• integration tests: ./gradlew integrationTest
• reference tests: ./gradlew ethereum:referenceTests:referenceTests

[shemnon]

Did we see if the gradle wrapper task wanted to update the shell scripts?

[usmansaleem]

Did we see if the gradle wrapper task wanted to update the shell scripts?

@shemnon I ran ./gradlew wrapper --gradle-version=8.7 --distribution-type=bin. The command didn't upgrade the shell scripts. Probably due to earlier upgrade to 7.6.4. #7030

[non-fungible-nelson]

Not sure if these are related, some bug reports:

from my own installDist on main:

Configure project :
Generating project version as supplied is version not semver: unspecified

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

• Where:
  Build file '/Users/matt.nelson/dev/mainnet/besu/ethereum/referencetests/build.gradle' line: 239

• What went wrong:
  Could not determine the dependencies of task ':installDist'.

Could not resolve all dependencies for configuration ':runtimeClasspath'.
Could not create task ':ethereum:referencetests:executionSpecTests'.
> /Users/matt.nelson/dev/mainnet/besu/ethereum/referencetests/src/reference-test/templates/BlockchainReferenceTest.java.template

---

From Seamonkey:
➜ besu git:(main) ./gradlew distTar installDist

Configure project :
Generating project version as supplied is version not semver: unspecified

Task :installDist FAILED

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

• What went wrong:
  A problem was found with the configuration of task ':installDist' (type 'Sync').

  • Gradle detected a problem with the following location: '/home/seamonkey/Downloads/holesky/besu/build/besu.autocomplete.sh'.

    Reason: Task ':installDist' uses this output of task ':autocomplete' without declaring an explicit or implicit dependency. This can lead to incorrect results being produced, depending on what order the tasks are executed.

Commithash: 45b6c08