> I think we should distinguish are two different kinds of builds: > 1) by the Debian build daemon > 2) by a user that downloaded the package source
Both of these must still work out of the box. In particular, as a user I should be able to apt-get source foo-java and just build it without having to fiddle with my javac alternatives. Indeed, I do this reasonably often (e.g., if I modify the sources, test bugfixes, etc) - package builds aren't done only by the buildds. If you want flexibility for users to be able to build with different compilers, I would suggest a build process that by default uses a known-to-work compiler (i.e., not /usr/bin/javac), but where this default can be overridden by the user setting some environment variable or other. Ben.
