Quick tips for upgrading to 5.5.20:
(a) download and unzip apache-tomcat-5.5.20
(b) update CATALINA_HOME and PATH variables.
(c) copy your 5.5.17/conf/tomcat-users.xml to 5.5.20/conf/
(d) Update ~/.hackystat/hackystat.site.properties for 5.5.20
I forgot (d) this morning. BTW, when updating the public server, you also
have to copy 5.5.17/webapps/ROOT/index.html to 5.5.20/webapps/ROOT.
Cheers,
Philip
--On Friday, September 29, 2006 8:50 AM -1000 Philip Johnson
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Well, here's a new wrinkle in the saga of Tomcat.
As most of you are aware, we have been encountering problems with Tomcat
since upgrading to 5.5.17 from 5.5.12. Basically, after N restarts of
Hackystat, Tomcat gets hosed and most of us have gone to the workaround
of re-installing a fresh version of Tomcat periodically.
In trying to figure out why this never happened until 5.5.17, we noticed
that in 5.5.17, Tomcat started deleting the build/war directory when
doing an undeploy. This is actually a majorly bad behavior for the
binary distributions, since if you try to redeploy a binary distribution
for the second time, Tomcat might delete your build/war directory
(requiring you to unzip the binary distribution again to recover it.)
Hongbing and I were looking at this issue yesterday and one of the things
we discovered is that a new version of Tomcat was just released.
Hongbing downloaded it last night and sent me a delighted email that (a)
5.5.20 no longer deletes the build/war directory when undeploying, and
(b) quickStart seems noticably faster to him (which makes sense, given
that it's no longer necessary to recompile the entire configuration now
that Tomcat doesn't delete the .class files :-)
I've just tried it out and can confirm that the war directory no longer
goes away. This is really good news, as it means we don't have to copy
the build/war directory someplace before deploying (which was our
strategy for dealing with this issue prior to the 5.5.20 release).
I took a closer look at the Tomcat manager documentation this morning.
Here's the relevent line from both the 5.5.17 and 5.5.20 versions:
"WARNING - This command will delete any web application artifacts that
exist within appBase directory (typically "webapps") for this virtual
host."
What this indicates to me is that 5.5.17 had a bug: it was deleting our
web application even though it did NOT exist within the webapps
directory.
So, the net of it is that I propose that we all update immediately to
5.5.20. (Hongbing: would you mind updating the hackydev box and the
public server?) I'd like us to gather as much experience as possible
with 5.5.20 before the next stable release, since I'm hoping that we can
make this the recommended tomcat version for that release.
Aaron: since you have had a lot of problems with Tomcat, I am
particularly interested to hear if 5.5.20 solves your problems.
Cheers,
Philip
