> From: Gary Weaver [mailto:gary.wea...@duke.edu] > Subject: Peering into the pit of jar hell - the mess of tomcat's and > otherjars in RPM distributions > > For years I've been using tar.gz'd Tomcat that I downloaded and > applications I used that had standalone installs would provide similar > looking directory layouts of Tomcat. All of those were just great. > > In the RPM'd Tomcat though, the directories are spread out all over the > place (which is acceptable), but from what I've been told, the > backporting of patches and possibly attempts to lower the number of the > same files (jar files in this case) leave you with a ton of sometimes > insane looking symlinks and files.
Yup - which is why many of us strongly recommend not to use the 3rd-party repackaged junk, but instead get a real Tomcat download. Unfortunately, the Tomcat committers have no control over what the repackagers do, and the repackagers seem oblivious to the damage done and trouble caused. > Here is what I'm talking about in /usr/share/java if you're unfamiliar: > > libgcj-4.1.1.jar > libgcj-4.1.2.jar -> libgcj-4.1.1.jar > libgcj-tools-4.1.1.jar > libgcj-tools-4.1.2.jar -> libgcj-tools-4.1.1.jar The above has nothing to do with Tomcat, luckily. BTW, you should toss the libgcj stuff if you need to run serious Java programs, and install a real JVM. > I don't fundamentally disagree with things often, but I really > don't agree that this is a good idea, and it is unfortunately > one of the worst messes of jars/dependencies I've seen in my > last 10 years as a Java developer (and I've seen some pretty > messed up things). Completely concur - but it's not done by Apache Tomcat, but rather whoever decided to repackage it in an anti-social manner. You can lodge your complaints to CentOS, and then stick with running a real Tomcat (and JVM). - Chuck THIS COMMUNICATION MAY CONTAIN CONFIDENTIAL AND/OR OTHERWISE PROPRIETARY MATERIAL and is thus for use only by the intended recipient. If you received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the e-mail and its attachments from all computers. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org
