tomcat6 and tomcat7 are not installable side-by-side

[Mina Galić]

The two packages libtomcat6-java and libtomcat7-java are incompatible to each other, and I don't understand why. Simply giving them different paths could've solved this problem and let us run them side-by-side. We still have many apps which target Tomcat 6, only the new ones are targeting Tomcat 7 as a platform. It would be a great simplification if we could install them on the same machines.

[Clint Byrum (clint-fewbar)]

Agreed, I believe alternatives should be used for the common files so that users can select the "default" ones.

Here are the files that are common to both in quantal:

/usr/share/java/catalina-ant.jar
/usr/share/java/catalina-tribes.jar
/usr/share/java/tomcat-coyote.jar
/usr/share/java/tomcat-i18n-es.jar
/usr/share/java/tomcat-i18n-fr.jar
/usr/share/java/tomcat-i18n-ja.jar
/usr/share/java/tomcat-juli.jar

That said, its hard to recommend spending much time on tomcat6. One can always use a chroot (see the 'schroot' package for a nice interface to these) to serve them both from the same machine.

Setting to Confirmed/Wishlist

[Mark Thornton (mthornton-2)]

It may not be worth fixing for tomcat 6, but perhaps when tomcat 8 arrives a little bit of thought when constructing the package would avoid the problem.

[Mina Galić (minagalic)]

Right now I have resorted to (re)packaging these myself.

[A1an (alan-b)]

@Igor can't your repackaged versions be simply put back to the main repo to become available and configuration merged to solve this issue?

[A1an (alan-b)]

Even worse, once you go for Tomcat7 there is no way back to Tomcat6 with apt, reported error is:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 tomcat6 : Depends: tomcat6-common (>= 6.0.35-1ubuntu3.2) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

On Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

[A1an (alan-b)]

This is still affecting Debian 7.2 as of today, is any workaround available meantime?

[Emmanuel Bourg (ebourg)]

This has been fixed in tomcat8 where the /usr/share/java files now start with "tomcat8". tomcat7 wasn't changed, but since tomcat6 has been removed this is no longer an issue in Debian 8 Jessie.