On 02/02/2010 22:57, Dan Armbrust wrote: > On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 3:23 PM, Caldarale, Charles R > <chuck.caldar...@unisys.com> wrote: >>> From: Richard Sickler [mailto:richard.sick...@avagotech.com] >>> Subject: Re: Problem on Tomcat 6.0.20 >>> >>> I removed a file and a directory named WebApplication2, and that >>> cleared up that problem. On to the next undocumented feature! >> >> It's fully documented: >> >> Context elements may be explicitly defined: >> ... >> * ... If the web application is packaged as a WAR then >> /META-INF/context.xml will be copied to >> $CATALINA_BASE/conf/[enginename]/[hostname]/ and renamed to match the >> application's context path. Once this file exists, it will not be replaced >> if a new WAR with a newer /META-INF/context.xml is placed in the host's >> appBase. >> > > Documented, yes. Astonishingly silly and surprising behaviour? Also yes. > > Good luck getting them to improve it. > https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=45979 > https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=32284 > > Near as I can tell, this surprising and bizarre behaviour occurs > because Remy likes it that way. > > In my opinion, Tomcat should remember if it copied the file out of a > war file... and if the war file is replaced, it should overwrite the > file with the new file from the new war file.
There are two opposing opinions on what is the correct behaviour here. That is one, the other is that if I want to edit the context.xml Tomcat should a) make this easy so I don't have to muck about with the WAR and b) not overwrite my changes. > Is it trivial? Not exactly, Tomcat would have to somehow keep track > of if the file was manually modified or not... but really, it just > needs to keep a hash of the file somewhere so it can check if the file > has been changed since it put it there. The simpler solution is just not to expand it. Tomcat doesn't need to expand it to read it. > I think Tomcat should also log a warning message when it doesn't copy > a context.xml from a war file... because the developer has made a > mistake at this point - someone manually changed one version, but > didn't change the one in the war file. That is a good idea for an enhancement. As ever, patches welcome. > The current "design" leads to people having problems like you have - > because beginning developers aren't (and really) shouldn't have to be > aware of this nasty gotcha of Tomcat. And overwriting an edited context.xml has similar gotchas. One idea I have seen proposed in the past is to make the extraction of context.xml configurable per host. That should be fairly simple. Again, patches welcome. I've added https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=48662 to track these ideas. Feel free to add to that. Mark --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org
