What is the asterisk in dependencyReport?

Nope, not there. Just did a gradle clean dR, same behavior Philip

  crotwell$ tail -10 build/reports/project/dependencies.txt

|

 \--- javax.servlet:servlet-api:2.3 (*)  +--- jetty:jetty:4.2.27  |

 \--- javax.servlet:servlet-api:2.3 (*)  \--- junit:junit:4.8.1 (*)

 versionCompile - Classpath for compiling the version sources.  No dependencies

 versionRuntime - Classpath for running the compiled version classes.  No dependencies

 
  crotwell$ gradle --version

 ------------------------------------------------------------  Gradle 1.3  ------------------------------------------------------------

 Gradle build time: Tuesday, November 20, 2012 11:37:38 AM UTC  Groovy: 1.8.6  Ant: Apache Ant(TM) version 1.8.4 compiled on May 22 2012  Ivy: 2.2.0  JVM: 1.6.0_37 (Apple Inc. 20.12-b01-434)  OS: Mac OS X 10.7.5 x86_64