Ultimately, we probably would need to somehow build a "patch" directory or lib directory where we can ensure the URLClassLoader picks that up before all other classes. I think this is probably a good idea to have as well, so that we could release "service paks" or patches. I would be interested in others' thoughts on this, but I think this would be a nice feature to have.
Right now I think your only choices are to either hard set a classpath to be sure the patches get picked up first or build a hacked Tomcat version, or rebuild Tomcat. Dain or David Jencks may be able to verify if the classpath solution would work or not as I have not dug into the new G classloaders to know if this would even be possible. The best solution right now may be to just build TC. I am a little confused as to why the TC guys say not to build the Tomcat from source (after its hacked). It seems like just an ant build script, so I don't understand why this is being discouraged. This way you can replace the Tomcat jars in the repo and you are good to go. Jeff Joe Bohn wrote: > > Jeff, > > I am working with a user that is moving some applications from tomcat to > geronimo. Due to some problems they have had to modify tomcat source. > I was chatting with jasonb on the tomcat irc channel and he recommended > that we only build the classes rather than rebuilding all of tomcat. He > discouraged rebuilding all of tomcat because there are many permutations > that can result in different build images and we should run with as much > of the official tomcat build as possible to avoid problems. He also > indicated that Tomcat's directory structure provides a place to put > these "patch classes" in CATALINA_HOME/server/classes . > > Is there a similar place that we can put classes when tomcat is running > under geronimo to have them picked up? Adding the tomcat classes to our > new sharedlib doesn't seem to be the right place because it would > require a dependency from the tomcat config on sharelib. The net result > would be that all tomcat apps would potentially pick up user classes > added in sharedlib even if the user only intended these classes for some > subset of the apps. > > Joe >
