For anyone following the gradle work that's been happening, I have a PR that overhauls how settings are overridden. Rather than using custom environment variables, it uses Gradle properties. This is exactly what properties in gradle were designed for, and they are more flexible.
I'd like 2 things: 1 - Code review for https://github.com/apache/cordova-android/pull/145 (Ian - mostly looking at you :P) 2 - Comments about whether there is a need to continue supporting the existing environment variables. Given that gradle is not enabled by default, and marked as experimental, I think they are fine to just change.
