I saw the Jira issue for migrating to Gradle was closed, but to be clear it's far from done. Like, a major TODO is building the release artifacts; the root project should do that (or should that be yet another sub-project instead?).
The second most important deficiency is producing all the 3 Maven artifacts for each published module (the usual artifact plus src and javadoc). Currently we only produce one artifact per module, and it's not even signed. BTW, I have factored out Manual generation into freemarker-manual (non-published module). There's also a TODO there as its build doesn't produce anything yet. -- Thanks, Daniel Dekany