Current status: I'm in the middle of trying to get leiningen to build with the new libclojure1.8-java builddep. While I've managed to get leiningen building, the resulting standalone jar appears to be re-compiling at runtime. I can't explain why this is happening, but I wonder if it's related to the default-jdk switch from Java 8 to Java 9. I'm unsure if Leiningen is compatible with Java 9; upstream seems to have a lot of issues.
This issue suggests that Java 9 is the problem as dynapath (via bultitude) does not work at all in Java 9. Hence, this is blocked until I can figure out how to pin the builddeps on Java 8. That's currently not possible as maven-helper has a dependency on default-jdk which pulls in Java 9.
Build has been fixed as of e21689c8 ; however, I noticed a serious performance regression and the autopkgtests were not passing.
I determined that this is because Leiningen was using (the new default) Java 9 at runtime, which was forcing recompilation of the bytecode built with Java 8. As well, the autopkgtests appear to be passing, because different help text is generated when Leiningen is AOT-compiled vs. JIT-compiled. The fix is to patch /usr/bin/lein to force Java 8 usage. I will also patch the runtime dependency to Java 8.
Elana Hashmanmarked the checklist item leiningen as completed