As the Gentoo Java lead I should probably comment on a couple of recent blog entries by Andrew John Hughes.
http://blog.fuseyism.com/index.php/2008/04/18/gentoo-and-free-java/
I have been trying to recruit a maintainer for FOSS Java stack for ages but no-one has stepped up. Unfortunate state of affairs but such is life with volunteer based distributions. I guess the fact that no-one has stepped up somewhat reflects on the needs of our users too. But any way gnu-classpath-0.97 has been stable for a while for x86 and amd64 in contrast to the 0.90 version stated in his blog.
http://blog.fuseyism.com/index.php/2008/04/27/releases-releases/
“The Java Gentoo developers seem to be on a strange mission to support only the proprietary Java solutions”
Well geki ( https://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/java/log/java-overlay/dev-java/icedtea ) is not a Gentoo developer so I don’t know who you are referring to and him being the maintainer of the GCJ overlay I don’t think he fits the bill either. If someone provided an ebuild for IcedTea that passed our QA standards, it could go in today. Otherwise it will get done after I have finished other stuff on my Gentoo work queue. I just finished adding a couple new virtuals for jaf and jmx. When packages are switched to use the virtuals it will remove the need to have sun-* or gnu-* packages installed for stuff that the JRE provides when using the latest JDKs.