I finally dove into fixing the problems on ARM and Jo Shield's message helped me. It turned out to be fairly simple to fix after looking all about the place to figure out what was going wrong.
This patch got 8u131 to build on my Cubietruck (armhf) and it installed okay. No idea if it works on arm64.
--- /usr/share/java-package/javase.sh.orig 2017-06-12 22:15:43.466524875 +1000 +++ /usr/share/java-package/javase.sh 2017-06-12 21:46:26.842048604 +1000 @@ -289,6 +289,12 @@ amd64|x64) j2se_debian_arch=amd64 ;; + arm-vfp-hflt|arm32-vfp-hflt) + j2se_debian_arch=armhf + ;; + arm64-vfp-hflt) + j2se_debian_arch=arm64 + ;; esac j2se_name="$j2se_package-$j2se_debian_arch" local target="$package_dir/$j2se_name" --- /usr/share/java-package/oracle-jdk.sh.orig 2017-06-12 22:15:59.405789191 +1000 +++ /usr/share/java-package/oracle-jdk.sh 2017-06-12 22:02:11.843633531 +1000 @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ j2se_release=0 # Update or GA release (jdk-7u15-linux-i586.tar.gz) - if [[ $archive_name =~ jdk-([0-9]+)(u([0-9]+))?-linux-(i586|x64|amd64|arm-vfp-hflt)\.(bin|tar\.gz) ]] + if [[ $archive_name =~ jdk-([0-9]+)(u([0-9]+))?-linux-(i586|x64|amd64|arm(32|64)-vfp-hflt)\.(bin|tar\.gz) ]] then j2se_release=${BASH_REMATCH[1]} j2se_update=${BASH_REMATCH[3]} @@ -186,11 +186,6 @@ java_browser_plugin="java-browser-plugin, " depends="\${shlibs:Depends}" if [ "${DEB_BUILD_ARCH:0:3}" = "arm" -a "${j2se_arch}" != "arm-vfp-hflt" ]; then - # ARM is only softfloat ATM so if building on armhf - # force the dependencies to pickup cross platform fu - if [ "${DEB_BUILD_ARCH}" == "armhf" ]; then - depends="libc6-armel, libsfgcc1, libsfstdc++6" - fi # No browser on ARM yet java_browser_plugin="" fi