[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#609038: ITP: biomaj -- a biological databank update and processing tool

[Steffen Möller]

Hello,

On 01/10/2011 11:01 AM, Olivier Sallou wrote:
> I have a question regarding Policy for web applications.
> 
> Biomj includes a webapp running in a servlet container like Tomcat. For
> the moment, Biomaj embeds Tomcat to run the webapp.

is Tomcat the only possible server environment that Biomj could
be using?

> For debian package we could rely of course on Tomcat package but I
> wonder what is Policy/usage for webapps usually.
> 
> Should we:
> - keep tomcat embedded for ready-to-run application (with config)
> - put tomcat as dependency and put the war file in tomcat webapps

If the answer to above question is "yes", then I would indeed
put it as a dependency and perform everything in post-inst
that would be required to get things up and running.

I personally would appreciate a page on http://wiki.debian.org,
but this is just something personal.

> - put tomcat as dependency and ask the user to copy manually the war
> file in tomcat

If the webservice is an extra and not an intrinsic part of the
application, then I tend to think that a separate package for
it would be reasonable to think about. The extra dependencies
on Tomcat would then apply to that extra package only and
not for the core functionality.

Best,

Steffen