17.10 openjdk and oracle jdk 8 and 9 the trustAnchors parameter must be non-empty

I reinstalled everything using apt-get and that didn't solve the problem.

The solution that I found to work: Go to Oracle and download the tar.gz version of jdk-8. Then copy the cacerts file from that into /etc/ssl/certs/java/cacerts

I ran into this issue as well when trying to set up scala build tool (sbt) on my fresh 17.10 installation.

My solution was to purge:

sudo apt purge openjdk-9-jdk openjdk-8-jdk java-common

(Just purging and reinstalling the jdk was not enough, I still had a java command after that. Only by purging java-common that also went away and then reinstallation worked. I assume it relates to the ca-certificates-java* package, that gets purged by java-common.)

Afterwards, I reinstalled java again (I opted only for openjdk-9):

sudo apt install openjdk-9-jdk

This triggered: Running hooks in /etc/ca-certificates/update.d... and added a lot of cert files. Now my sbt built was succesful:

$ sbt
Getting org.scala-sbt sbt 1.1.0  (this may take some time)...
downloading https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/scala-sbt/sbt/1.1.0/sbt-1.1.0.jar ...
    [SUCCESSFUL ] org.scala-sbt#sbt;1.1.0!sbt.jar (657ms)
downloading https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/scala-sbt/main_2.12/1.1.0/main_2.12-1.1.0.jar
...  

I have reinstalled everything from scratch again and this problem has disappeared. All I did differently was install openjdk-8-jdk prior to installing openjdk-9-jdk.

It works. Are there any weird dependency issues?

I copied a /etc/ssl/certs/java/cacerts file from a backup of an older installation. If you have something like that it's probably the easiest option. Just make sure to backup the original cacerts file in case you run into trouble with other applications.