apt-get --purge

[Adam Hardy <adam.ant@cyberspaceroad.com>]

I want to understand what apt-get does with the files of a package I'm having 
problems with, but there seems to be stuff going on that the man page isn't 
telling me about.

I installed tomcat5.5 and then tomcat5.5-admin.

There seemed to be some serious problem with the tomcat manager installed by 
tomcat5.5-admin, which stopped tomcat starting, so I tried to de-install it.

I ran apt-get remove tomcat5.5-admin

The problem though remained - the tomcat manager settings were preventing a 
clean start-up.

So I ran apt-get --purge remove tomcat5.5-admin

This made no difference. So I ran

apt-get --purge remove tomcat5.5

to clear the whole lot. However it let various tomcat files in 
/usr/share/tomcat5.5/ which I manually deleted.

I re-installed tomcat, but the bootstrap.jar - one of the main start-up binaries 
- was not reinstalled.

Why did this happen? Surely a purge should wipe the slate clean?

Thanks
Adam