So we ran into this too - with a customer who downloaded the latest rev of Tomcat 8. Took us half the day yesterday and most of today to get to the bottom of it. In troubleshooting, I tried using 7 instead but it was still failing there (and now I see that the change is in recent revs of all versions).
Is there a setting we can use to revert to the previous behavior? Or what's the best way to workaround/fix this? I'm not sure if it's in this particular set of changes, but if so, it looks like we might be able to turn it off... https://github.com/apache/tomcat/commit/eb195bebac8239b994fa921aeedb136a93e4ccaf
