I recommend making the new resolver available in Groovy 6 with a target of making it the default in Groovy 7 if Ivy goes archive status or Maven impl proves superior. The 2.6 rele4ase getting cancelled and not having a release where new parser was available but not on by default was a big miss IMO.
As far as enabling the new resolver, system property or @GrabConfig (just an idea) seem fine to me. I don't think you need to go the service loader route just yet until you get some more feedback. I don't see any issue with using the RC5 maven resolver since, as you stated, Groovy 6 itself is alpha or pre-alpha state. Re Ivy: are there any specific bugs that are causing a problem for Grab/Grapes? I could work on a fix for anything that is a bug not a new feature. P.S. I would like to see a Groovy 5 (and possibly 4 and 3) release in the month of March.
