All, William L. Thomson Jr. wrote: > On Sun, 2006-12-24 at 11:20 -0500, David Smith wrote: > >> 1. Compiling tomcat. Why??? > > Because it's FOSS why not? I might want to use a newer version of things > Tomcat is compiled against. There are tons of reasons, thus the link I > provided before. Here it is again for reference. > http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/java/why-build-from-source.xml
[snip] > You seem to miss entirely the fact that the "extra" stuff is necessary > and needed to BUILD/COMPILE a version of Tomcat equivalent to the > binary. Granted after compile, some of the stuff remains, and there are > extra jars linked into Tomcat's install on Gentoo. Some might call that > a convenience. However even if we remove it from runtime, it's still > needed at build time. One need look no further than Cocoon for a Java project that: 1. Does not issue official binary releases (unless something has changed recently) 2. Requires compilation from source (duh) 3. Allows optional inclusion of (many) components This provides users a kind of "give me only what I want" menu of stuff you can compile into Cocoon, which improves security, stability, and maintainability from a deployment point of view. I realize that developing a completely new build process for TC isn't exactly on the top of anyone's list, but Cocoon provides a compelling and workable solution (even if it is quite irritating for newbies). With a build system like Cocoon's, Gentoo could pretty much make all of the optional components into USE flags so that a bare-bones Tomcat would be available to anyone who didn't need anything extra. JSSE is one such obvious component (that was previously mentioned). Although this post would have probably been more productive on the dev list, I'm glad that you posted here, too, William. I love the "Gentoo way", and even if I think that most Java packages are silly to compile from scratch (log4j anyone?), TC probably belongs in that category. -chris
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