It took some time to get the synchronization on GitHub up an running in a similar way as Odoo was synchronized with OCB on Launchpad, but this is now up and running as of this week.
 

I couldn't find any official reference that OCB may be discontinued but there is a reference here that there is a new policy from Odoo to respond faster to GitHub pull requests coming from the community and that in this case OCB may not be needed in the future (Not an official OCA statement). If this is true, then the OCB repository may already have stopped being updated.

ok, the status (as per feedback from the Odoo Commuity mailing list) seems to be the following:

the OCB versions of odoo/OpenERP are not being abandoned. There is apparantly a commitment about quicker pull request by for commumity patches from OpenERP S.A. but still OCB version of Odoo/OpenERP is far from being obsolete.

now to the inital problem of this post (ocb v8 not being updated):  not being released yet v8 is not really maintained on the ocb fork yet.

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to practically solve this I was suggested to add the add ~/odoo/odoo as remote and get updates from there (until ocb-v8 is being maintained). These 3 steps where advised to me to achieve this (actually I think you add the 'original' ~/odoo/odoo) repository as a remote source where your local (ocb) repository get's updates from.

1. git remote add odoo https://github.com/odoo/odoo.git
2. git fetch odoo 8.0:odoo-8.0
3. git checkout odoo/8.0

not sure whether this actually did something good (what I wanted). After command 3 (git checkout odoo/8.0) I get a

you are in a 'detached HEAD' state". You can look around, make experimental changes and commit them, and you can discard any commits you make in this state without impaciting any branches by performing another checkout.

If you want to create a new branch ....

What I want is start working with odoo v8 and get to a stable OCB version sooner or later. The whole idea about this current stunt is to get as recent as possible (which is the ~/odoo/odoo version)

any suggestions on this?