Re: RFC: provides: java-servlet-engine

[Stefan Gybas <stefan@gybas.com>]

Nic Ferrier wrote:

> Well... all 2.2 onwards compliant servlet engines now have such a
> tool.

I guess you are talking about the deployment descriptor
(WEB-INF/web.xml) for webapps. But this is not what might be desired
for Cocoon: If you set the *.xml mapping for a Cocoon webapp, it will
only be valid for this context, e.g. XML files under /cocoon are
parsed by Cocoon but not XML files in the root context or any other
context.

This should be configured for all contexts but there is the problem:
The servlet 2.2 spec does not require such a configuration file and
in fact Tomcat 3.2 does not have one (there was a global web.xml in
previous versions, but Tomcat 3.2 ignores it). You could only configure
this in the main server configuration file which in the case of Tomcat
if a conffile (/etc/tomcat/server.xml) and must not be modified by other
Debian packages' postinst.

To go back to the main topic: I'm not really against a
java-servlet-engine virtual package but I still don't see its benefits.
It might be useful if you package GNU Paperclips but then it should
only be used for a servlet 2.2 engine that supports webapps in
/usr/share/java/webapps/, i.e. not for JServ.

-- 
Stefan Gybas