Wondering if anyone can help me here. Suddenly getting this error using Gradle 5.2.1 (no recent changes to gradle configuration) when accessing artifacts from maven central:

[Fatal Error] jackson-datatype-jsr310-2.10.5.pom:1:44: Content is not allowed in prolog.
[Fatal Error] jackson-module-parameter-names-2.10.5.pom:1:44: Content is not allowed in prolog.
[Fatal Error] jackson-datatype-jdk8-2.10.5.pom:1:44: Content is not allowed in prolog.
[Fatal Error] jackson-databind-2.10.5.pom:1:44: Content is not allowed in prolog.

“Content is not allowed in prolog” is an error that occurs when trying to parse xml that is not valid xml. Perhaps there’s a proxy in between Gradle and Maven Central which is returning some garbage instead of the pom

From the machine doing the Gradle build, can you try to curl (or wget) one of the poms?
Eg: https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/fasterxml/jackson/datatype/jackson-datatype-jsr310/2.10.5/jackson-datatype-jsr310-2.10.5.pom