While I preffer my soloution to sebastiens his current nmu to delayed will solve the main bug. Neither soloution is ideal (mine involves a lot of hardcoding, shauns takes away choice of JRE) but I think the ideal soloution will have to wait until post lenny.Thanks for your work. I'm away on my honeymoon though, and so won't be able to help out. If, amongst yourslves, you're able to arrive at a consensus as to the best solution, please NMU as necessary.
Long term I think we need a standard tool provided by one of the core java packages that selects a JRE/JDK based on a set of requirements (requirements may include things like being based on the sun code, supporting a certain version of the java standard/classfile format, being native to the current debian architecture, supporting a gui etc) using the users preffered JRE if it meets those requirements and a set of virtual packages to go with them to allow packages to depend on having a JRE that meets thier requirements).