Hi all,
It seems that the pom on 1.5.x was formatted recently and the arguments given to the forked test vm were split up over multiple lines. Apparently ( to my astonishment ) this lead to failures yielding the following:
Unrecognized option: -enableassertions
Could not create the Java virtual machine.
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] BUILD FAILURE
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] There are test failures.
Just a note so no one else bangs their head against the wall 
-justin
--
Justin Deoliveira
The Open Planning Project
http://topp.openplans.org