It would be great if checkstyle plugin will allow to set particular version of tool. (Like pmd plugin allows to it with toolVersion property.)
All code quality plugins that ship with Gradle allow to set the tool version (e.g. ‘checkstyle.toolVersion = “5.3”’).
Just anupdate: The code-quality plugin seems to be deprecated. See http://forums.gradle.org/gradle/topics/specifying_which_checkstyle_libraries_to_use , http://forums.gradle.org/gradle/topics/gradle_checkstylew_default_version_should_be_increased