Bug#525895: tomcat5.5-webapps: webapps not reachable in the default install

[Olivier Cailloux]

Package: tomcat5.5-webapps
Version: 5.5.26-5
Severity: normal

I recently did a aptitude reinstall tomcat5.5 tomcat5.5-admin tomcat5.5-webapps after some mistake I did moving tomcat files around. Then I observed that pointing to http://localhost:tomcat-port yields a blank page. Only going to the manager web application works, not the example webapps. Indeed, these are installed into /usr/share/tomcat5.5-webapps where the webapp root folder is /etc/tomcat5.5/Catalina/localhost (AFAIU). Only after ln -s /usr/share/tomcat5.5-webapps/*.xml /etc/tomcat5.5/Catalina/localhost/ did the example web applications become reachable.

I am sorry for this unuseful bug report if this is due to some mistake
but I guess that a reinstall should render the package usable again. If
not a mistake by me, this bug severity could maybe even be "grave" as
the webapps are not useable until the user modifies something to the
installation...

Also, the front webapp ("ROOT") accessed on http://localhost:tomcat-port
says that "the default Tomcat home page... can be found on the local
filesystem at: $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/ROOT/index.jsp", which is not
correct according to where debian installs it. As the goal of this page
seems to help new tomcat users, this can be a very misleading information!

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (990, 'stable'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.25-2-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=fr_BE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_BE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages tomcat5.5-webapps depends on:
ii  tomcat5.5                     5.5.26-5   Servlet and JSP engine

tomcat5.5-webapps recommends no packages.

tomcat5.5-webapps suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information