The Gradle wrapper is designed to download Gradle from a known location and make it available for local use. It does this by storing the distribution in the `~/.gradle` directory. As far as I know, there's no way to prevent the Gradle wrapper from copying the distribution zip file and unzipping it.

I assume that you have your Gradle Wrapper configured to 'download' the distribution from the SVN externals directory instead?
Are all of your CI jobs running with different user home directories?

Storing Gradle distribution in home directory is ok. I assume it is necessary for Gradle to work. Problem is that same distribution is copied multiple times.

CI jobs are run by same user. It's not root cause of problem.

I think that current Gradle behavior is like below (I didn't look at source code, though):
1. Gradle wrapper is calculating hash code from whole path to Gradle distribution.
2. If there is directory named with same hash in c:\Users\me\.gradle\wrapper\dists\gradle-1.4-bin\ it is assumed that distribution is already installed. If there is different hash code of distribution path, then distribution is installed again.

Assumption behind above algorithm works in many cases. But in general you can not assume that different distribution location always mean different distribution. E.g. in my case different distribution paths point to same distribution.

I think it would be better to make distribution resolution in 2 steps:
1. Gradlew should first check distribution path (as it is fast)
2. Then if there is already information in cache it should use installed distribution
3. If there is not information in gradlew cache about distribution, then there should be calculated hash from whole distribution zip (or at least from distribution name).
a. if according to calculated hash there is already installed gradle distribution in dists directory, cache should be updated and existing distribution should be used.
b. if there is no distribution in dists, then distribution should be downloaded, unpacked and installed.

Above algorithm should be fast and should not cause duplicated distributions, even if distribution paths are different.

It seems odd that you're experiencing this behaviour. What does your `grade-wrapper.properties` file look like? Are you configuring the `distributionPath` or the `distributionUrl`?

Well, it works this way. It's simple to reproduce, I have even created test case:

1. Create 3 projects in some directory: project1, project2, project3
2. Put into projects following 'gradle.build' file:

apply plugin: 'java'
task wrapper(type: Wrapper) {
gradleVersion = '1.5-rc-3'
distributionUrl = 'gradle-1.5-rc-3-bin.zip'
}

3. In every project's root directory execute: gradle wrapper
4. Put bin distribution of gradle 1.5 rc3 into created /gradle/wrapper directory in every project
5. Execute ./gradlew test in root of every project
6. You will see that gradle is unzipped and installed 3 times - once for every project

I have a zipped files, but can't attach it to this thread.

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I don't understand the use case of wanting to host the Wrapper ZIP file in each of the projects. That defeats the purpose of the Wrapper. I am going to mark the issues as "Won't fix".