Packaging for tomcat - best practices?

[Adrian Bridgett]

I'm packaging up (for private use only ATM I'm afraid) some web
applications and wondered if people had any "best practices".  I'm
learning tomcat like crazy but it looks like the whole webapp stuff
doesn't really sit very nicely with FHS.   Some of these applications
provide .war files, however quite a few do not.

Currently I'm ending up with packages roughly like this:

 - most code in package in /usr/share/<package>
 - sample context file in /etc/<package>/<package>.xml
   (docBase set to /usr/share/<package>)
 - symlink from /var/lib/tomcat5/Catalina/localhost/<package>.xml to 
   /etc/<package>/<package>.xml
 - perhaps other configuration files in /etc/<package>
 
Final setup instructions (database details etc) in README.Debian.
I'm running them against the tomcat5.5 packages FWIW.

It all just feels so unclean - particularly when it comes down to jar
files where each webapp seems to include 50 libraries - no wonder each
Java app seems to be a 50MB download :-(   Suggestions as to how and
where to split libraries etc would be greatly appreciated.

I don't normally read this ML, so a Cc wouldn't go amiss :-)

Thanks in advance,

Adrian