tomcat not unpacking wars

[Rathna]

Here is my conf/server.xml

<Engine ...>
...
<Host name="something.com" appBase="webapps-demo"
            unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true"
            xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">
          <Alias>www.something.com</Alias>
</Host>
...

I created a directory $CATALINA_HOME/webapps-demo and deployed a war file
named ROOT.war within it.

On starting tomcat, I expected the ROOT.war to have unarchived as 'ROOT'
directory with contents. That didn't happen! Kindly help.

If I deploy the ROOT.war as demo.war under /webapps directory, it explodes
as a 'demo' directory with contents just fine.

Tomcat version: 8.0.29

Java version: 1.8.0