I agree, my above comment was aimed at this part of the parent comment:
> a huge and over-complicated xml-based system
It was an attempt to show that there are not 'umpteen different alternatives' and the ones that exist, do so for a reason. Though looking back, I should have worded it in a better way.
You make it sound like adding Apache Groovy for configuration to a build system is an improvement. When build systems with a declarative config language, such as make, ant, and maven, replace procedural build scripts, that's the improvement. Using a procedural language like Groovy instead is a large leap backwards because it encourages programmers to add unneeded procedural features to build scripts, creating an unmaintainable mess.