Advice for building tomcat8 on jessie?

[Roberto C. Sánchez <roberto@debian.org>]

Hello Tomcat Maintainers,

I have prepared a tomcat8 package for jessie (version 8.0.14-1+deb8u12)
which addresses CVE-2018-1304 and CVE-2018-1305.  When I try to build
the package in a pbuilder chroot (invoked from gbp), the build fails.

Here is the tail end of the build output:

BUILD FAILED
/build/tomcat8-8.0.14/build.xml:1345: Some tests completed with an Error. See /build/tomcat8-8.0.14/output/build/logs for details, search for "FAILED".

Total time: 45 minutes 32 seconds
debian/rules:55: recipe for target 'build-stamp' failed
make: *** [build-stamp] Error 1
dpkg-buildpackage: error: debian/rules build gave error exit status 2
I: copying local configuration
E: Failed autobuilding of package
I: unmounting dev/ptmx filesystem
I: unmounting dev/pts filesystem
I: unmounting dev/shm filesystem
I: unmounting proc filesystem
I: unmounting sys filesystem
I: Cleaning COW directory
I: forking: rm -rf /var/cache/pbuilder/build/cow.21397
gbp:error: 'git-pbuilder' failed: it exited with 1


I tried building the current package (8.0.14-1+deb8u11) and it also
fails, as does 8.0.14-1+deb8u12 when I build it with openjdk-7
7u151-2.6.11-1~deb8u1 (I thought that 7u181 might perhaps be part of the
cause).

As it turns out, the 8.0.14-1+deb8u12 package does have one unit test
failure that that 8.0.14-1+deb8u11 does not have:

     [junit] Running org.apache.tomcat.websocket.TestUtil
     [junit] Tests run: 21, Failures: 0, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0, Time elapsed
     [junit] Running org.apache.tomcat.websocket.TestWebSocketFrameClient
-    [junit] Tests run: 1, Failures: 0, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0, Time elapsed
+    [junit] Tests run: 1, Failures: 1, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0, Time elapsed
+    [junit] Test org.apache.tomcat.websocket.TestWebSocketFrameClient FAILED
     [junit] Running org.apache.tomcat.websocket.TestWebSocketFrameClientSSL
     [junit] Tests run: 2, Failures: 0, Errors: 2, Skipped: 0, Time elapsed
     [junit] Test org.apache.tomcat.websocket.TestWebSocketFrameClientSSL FAILED

Interestingly, that unit test does not fail in a build with 7u151.

The package from sid (8.5.32-1) builds successfully.

The only way I was able to get the jessie package to build was to use
the "nocheck" option to skip the unit tests.  Since the unit tests are
on by default, I am reluctant to upload a package built with "nocheck".
I also want to make sure that I am building the package correctly before
wasting time trying to diagnose a unit test failure that may have
nothing to do with the patches I introduced.

I would very much appreciate your guidance on this so that I can get
tomcat8 in jessie updated.

Regards,

-Roberto

-- 
Roberto C. Sánchez