This 2nd release candidate for 2.5 adds fixes for GRADLE-3312, that affected publishing via maven-publish to urls with redirects. Furthermore it fixes a regression in the tar.gz handling (see GRADLE-3310) and some minor documentation issues. Please see the release notes for more information on how this may affect your builds.
Please try Gradle 2.5-rc-2 with your projects and let us know your experiences. We expect to release Gradle 2.5 final very soon.
This is being tracked as GRADLE-3286. There are actually a number of issues that need to be addressed with regards to JDK 9 support which we have organized under this design spec.