Disclaimer: the following results were obtained by using Unix tools to
extract the official zip and targz binary downloads.
On 12.12.2008 21:31, andrew wrote:
* If you want to use Tomcat as a Windows service, use the .zip Tomcat
* distribution, not the .tar.gz distribution.
I think it is worth elaborating some though. If anyone out there has
influence on the build and/or documentation, I hope you will read further.
1. Rainer Jung suggested that the behavior difference I see between the
two distros could be expained by line-ending
differences/incompatibilities (particularly in config files). This does
NOT appear to be true in my case. I've looked at the .xml files in the
/conf directory, and they have *nix style line endings in BOTH distros.
Sorry, I wanted to get one possible factor out of your problem. I double
checked. In fact it looks like Rémy switched his release procedure from
a Windows based to a Linux based machine. With 6.0.14 the files were
basically Windows files, except for those that were explicitely fixed to
Unix-style using ant immediately before putting them into the targz.
6.0.18 seems to be build on *nix, so all files are basically *nix types
and the previous switch to *nix for certain files has not been replaced
to a switch to Windows type for those. That's why you now have *nix type
files for config etc. It slipped my attention.
The only files with special treatment in the bin distribution are bat
and sh files, which we set to their native line ends, and binary
formats, which remain unchanged, independently form the build platform.
All other files seem to be *nix (like config files). Most of them (but
not all), where Windows type at least until 6.0.14.
3. From what I am seeing, it appears that the .zip and .tar.gz archives
were actually created from different source trees, as oposed to just
being different compressions of the same source. The differences are
minor, but not attributable to tar version incompatibilities, for
example. If that is true, then I suggest NOT adding files with extension
.exe to the .tar.gz build/distribution. Doing so seems like an implicit
confirmation that the distro is meant to be run on Windows.
From what i can see inside the official downloads, the contents are the
same except for LICENSE and conf/context.xml, which both have no line at
after the las line in the zip version, and do it in the targz version.
This most likely comes form the fact, that for historical reasons both
files are run through fixcrlf before putting into the targz archive.
So it looks like the files are identical in source (in terms of the code
repository=subversion path and revision), but yes, they are not exactly
identical in the archive (two files with an additional end of line).
For those of you who think that I deserved this for being silly enough
to extract the .tar.gz distro on Windows in the first place, well,
maybe. I'll definitely use .zip in the future whenever there is an
option. But keep in mind that I've used tar quite a bit on Windows -- I
haven't seen anything like this before. When I first downloaded Tomcat,
I remember thinking it was really cool that it could be offered as a
platform independent "Binary Distribution" thanks to Java. And man, the
failure mode is subtle -- I didn't see it until after a month of use.
The result of the release process at the moment looks like you can
really use whatever archive format you like on both platforms. I can't
se a relevant difference in the extracted files.
It is questionable though, whether contining *nix config files, license
files etc. is the best way of delivering Tomcat for the Windows
platform. It does work technically, but it might mean some anoyance for
the users (e.g. when using notepad to edit those files).
Regards,
Rainer
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org
