I was wondering about when a free jdk would be bumped for supporting jdk-1.8. Sadly, it seems that icedtea is stalled. Reading bug 547912 it seems that some work was done for bumping icedtea but, since I don't know how that efforts ended, I would only suggest to follow Fedora path: they seem to be packaging openjdk directly (and successfully). Their .spec file can be seen here: http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/rpms/java-1.8.0-openjdk.git/tree/java-1.8.0-openjdk.spec Maybe that could help to "unblock" a bit the situation, if it turns to be too difficult to achieve, no problem, feel free to close the bug Thanks
You could have just dropped by #gentoo-java and asked us what was going on instead of filing a bug about it. :( You don't have to look very hard to see that there have been several icedtea-3 prereleases added to java-overlay in the past year. I've even added icedtea-bin:8 to the main tree with an entry in virtual/jdk in just the past few days, though it's only for ppc64 right now. That is partly because ppc64 needs a stable replacement for Java 6 (7 has issues) but also so some initial testing can be done without disrupting the more popular architectures. I know I said "soon" back in July but there's only 2 active devs working on the mountain of general Java issues. Much of my time since then has been spent trying to get rid of Java 6.
I second everything James said. I'm curious as to how you think Gentoo taking on packaging OpenJDK alone would help anything. Even if the dedicated project was stalled (which it isn't; a simple glance at the commit history would have told you that), how would the Gentoo Java team, with many other packages to maintain as well, be able to do any better? Maintaining OpenJDK packaging is a lot of work. Fedora has been doing it separately for about five years, and all it's done is result in a lot of duplication of work between there and the IcedTea project. If you want a Free (as in Freedom) Java 8 JDK now, install layman, add the Java overlay and you can emerge icedtea:8. It is largely ready to go; the main thing we're trying to do is make sure we don't regress on many of the changes that are in the previous version. Testing it and reporting any bugs you encounter would be more helpful than this bug :-)
