Gradle bootstrap build with maven

[Moritz]

Hello everyone,

I got interested in the problem of bootstrapping a modern versions of 
Gradle, mainly due to the old version available in Debian. As far as I 
can tell, efforts have been mostly focused on using older versions to 
bootstrap an up-to-date version. I wanted to explore the feasibility and 
effort required to bootstrap with Maven instead. I now have a working 
purely Maven-based build that generates a distribution capable of 
building Gradle itself. The code is available here 
<https://github.com/MorMundHS-MA/gradle-maven-bootstrap>.

While it was fun, I am not sure how much this actually helps as it still 
requires a pre-build Kotlin compiler (at least 1.8 I think, even though 
>2.0 is used). Additionally some of the other dependencies are also 
built with Gradle and would have to be bootstrapped as well. But I 
wanted to share my progress so far non the less.

Best,
Moritz