List available module versions, maven-metadata.xml retrieval

in order to build a true build-pipeline with gradle mostly decoupled from extensive jenkins configurations I would need to know which versions of a certain artifact arrived in a stage repository. based on the version list I could run certain tasks (like integrTest, reportBuild siteBuild, promoteToNextStage) for all versions of this stage. with version ranges I can just select the newest version but not all. Is there a gradle way to get the list of version or would I need to it the manual way via maven-metadata.xml? And if so is there a gradle way to retrieve unversioned artifacts like maven-metadata.xml or would I need to download it also manually?

thanks david