Yes, maybe this is short. On the other hand, one can take into consideration that the last message of Ean about upgrading (at that time it was to kaffe 1.1.0) was almost two month ago (see #196867). And there has been a mail on this list (which I assume he should read) about problems contacting him.Doesn't a few days seem abnormally short notice for such a major NMU - not a bugfix but an entire new upstream release?
In my experience kaffe worked better than gij. I might highly depend on the type of program you are running. Maybe I should also try again with gij.The gij interpreter is quite advanced and for me works better than kaffe in almost all cases where I've done a comparison. There is no reason (in most cases) that an out-of-date kaffe should be a bottleneck for packages progressing into main.
In any case, kaffe 1.1.0 is much better than 1.0.7, so it would be great to have it in Debian.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to focus on making ant go into main? Assuming that needs fixing free JVMs and/or writing library code, it would be work useful to other projects, instead of duplicating work to work-around the issue.Incidentally, several java packages could move from contrib into main if the maintainers could simply take the time to write their own Makefiles instead of relying on the default ant build system which is in contrib, e.g., #163168. It's a bit of work but it's certainly possible - see jython for an example.
Daniel