This predates me, so I don't know the rationale for repackaging Tomcat inside HTTPFS. I suspect that there was a desire to create a fully stand-alone distribution package, including a full web server. The Maven Jetty plugin isn't directly applicable to this use case. I don't know why it was decided to use Tomcat instead of Jetty. (If anyone else out there has the background, please respond.) Regardless, if the desire is to package a full web server instead of just the war, then switching to Jetty would not change the challenges of the build process. We'd still need to preserve whatever permissions are present in the Jetty distribution.
In general, when I was working on this, I did not question whether the current packaging was "correct". I assumed that whatever changes I made for Windows compatibility must yield the exact same distribution without changes on currently supported platforms like Linux. If there are questions around actually changing the output of the build process, then that will steer the conversation in another direction and increase the scope of this effort. It seems like the trickiest issue is preservation of permissions and symlinks in tar files. I suspect that any JVM-based solution like custom Maven plugins, Groovy, or jtar would be limited in this respect. According to Ant documentation, it's a JDK limitation, so I suspect all of these would have the same problem. I haven't tried any of them though. (If there was a feasible solution, then Ant likely would have incorporated it long ago.) If anyone wants to try though, we might learn something from that. Thank you, --Chris On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 5:55 PM, Radim Kolar <h...@filez.com> wrote: > Dne 22.11.2012 1:14, Chris Nauroth napsal(a): > > The trickiest maintenance issue is hadoop-hdfs-httpfs, where we unpack >> and repack a Tomcat. >> > why its not possible to just ship WAR file? Its seems to be special > purpose app and they needs hand security setup anyway and intergration with > existing firewall/web infrastructure. > > did you considered to use Jetty? it has really good maven support: > http://wiki.eclipse.org/Jetty/**Feature/Jetty_Maven_Plugin<http://wiki.eclipse.org/Jetty/Feature/Jetty_Maven_Plugin> > I am using jetty 8 instead of tomcat and run it with java -jar start.jar > no extra file permissions like x bit are needed. > > If you really need to create tar by hand, there is java library for doing > it - http://code.google.com/p/jtar/ and it can be used from any JVM based > script language, you have plenty of choices. >
