Comment 5 for bug 1491526

A few of the original failures were fixed after pushing a new joda-time into the repository (LP: #1491530) and the others - as you said - seem to be fixed due to the new rspec.

Without access to the rebuild log that failed I can't tell what went wrong at the time to make any guesses why it went ok this time.

As for your local failure, it happened because your chroot propagates environment variables and HOME was set to '~', which JRuby was unable to expand properly. And yes, it is bad "packaging" practice to depend on HOME being set or even existing, but those particular tests are from JRuby's mspec and hardly makes sense to change them (at most we could try disabling them) - note that the debian/rules file does try to take that into account by setting HOME to '/tmp' but only when it is unset.