J. R. Westmoreland wrote:
I'm looking at the versions of tomcat4 and find that debian version is 4.1.28 while apache version is 4.1.27.
4.1.28 is labeled as alpha version by the Jakarta team because it ships newer version on Xerces, regexp and Commons Modeler and because it includes the newer Apache connectors from Tomcat 5.x. The version is not advertised on the web site but it can be downloaded from any mirror, e.g. http://www.apache.de/dist/jakarta/tomcat-4/ in the directory v4.1.28-alpha.
Since the Debian package has never used the included JARs from the Tomcat distribution using 4.1.27 would not make any difference, except for the connectors which have been split into another source package.
Stefan