On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 3:14 PM, Christopher Schultz <ch...@christopherschultz.net> wrote: > +1
I'm glad someone is interested :) > Perhaps we could have some representatives from the various > distributions give a joint presentation. That would be great. I'd love to meet the other distro maintainers. > Coty, are you in any way > involved with the RHEL package-management of Tomcat? Emmanuel Bourg > appears to be involved with the Debian package-managed distributions > of Tomcat. Yep. I maintain tomcat for RHEL and am a co-maintainer of tomcat for Fedora/Fedora EPEL. I've seen quite a few of Emmanuel's posts to the list. > The speakers might want to come prepared to be hit with a few > tomatoes, since distro-specific weirdness is something of a popular > topic. Often "install the official ASF distribution" seems to fix many > issues posted here. Yeah...I get that all the time :( I've only been the maintainer for about a year and can't make any functional changes (just maintenance updates mostly), but I have been working with BZ owners and folks on freenode to try and remedy the concerns that they voice. I honestly think it's quite a mess at the moment too, so I'm all for cleaning things up. The biggest problem is probably users not understanding how the distro chops up the tomcat distribution to make it modular. When you install tomcat, you get the tomcat core code, the API implementations, and that's it. If you want to use the ROOT webapp or admin webapps, you have to install them, etc. This allows for the minimum required packages to be installed and for users to add whatever else they need. It also allows for you to install individual things (like the servlet API, for example) without installing the whole tomcat distribution. There is a lot of outdated reasons for things being the way that they are (which I keep stumbling onto, so I should probably start a document somewhere and explain the structure as I see it. > I think it would be a good idea to use some of that time to solicit > feedback from the audience about what the distros could do to make > things easier... +1, definitely. I will to do anything that we can to drive adoption of tomcat up (distro-specific versions or ASF). > and perhaps what Tomcat could to to make things > easier for the distros. Package-managed versions of Tomcat always seem > to be hideously out-of-date, for example. Perhaps that's due to our > distribution style (new version) which is quite different from httpd's > style (patches + occasional new versions). You're right. We had the same problem in Fedora until I started pushing for updates when new releases and CVE fixes were released to get them incorporated into Fedora as quickly as possible, so I don't think that this problem exists there. I've also been helping with updates for tomcat-native. The biggest concern that I've heard from various of the involved people (and may be a reason why other distros don't consume updates as frequently) is that tomcat is not that great at maintaining backwards compatibility; I hear this complaint a lot and I get push back from packages that have dependencies on tomcat when I do push our new revision updates. I don't have any specific examples that I can think of right now other than the update from 8.0 to 8.5 removing BIO. That has presented a huge issue for the FreeIPA folks because Debian updated to 8.5 (I haven't updated Fedora yet because of this and a couple of stability concerns) and the removal of BIO makes it incompatible with dogtag via tomcatjss (a tomcat interface to NSS for crypto instead of OpenSSL). Granted they've known for a while that they needed to update, we removed a feature from tomcat in the same major release. This same group is asking for documentation regarding a policy on backwards compatibility; do we have that somewhere? Thanks!! --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org
