I've built a part with the maven plugin, which 'just worked'. Looking at my stage area however, I only see paths to the java executable include my architecture: $ find stage -name java stage/usr/share/java stage/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64/bin/java stage/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64/jre/bin/java stage/etc/ssl/certs/java Without /usr/bin/java or similar, I can't define my apps: section in an architecture independent way. Some update-java-alternatives magic or a symlink seems to be needed.