Tomcat 8.5: Upstream Tomcat 8.0 is end of life on 30 June 2018.

[Ross Coleman]

Tomcat 8.0 is going end of life on 2018-06-30, in favor of Tomcat 8.5.
https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-80-eol.html
https://tomcat.apache.org/whichversion.html

It looks like Spring Framework 5.0 is going to require Tomcat 8.5+:
https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework/wiki/What%27s-New-in-the-Spring-Framework#whats-new-in-spring-framework-5x

It also looks like Debian 9 ships with Tomcat 8.5:
https://www.debian.org/News/2017/20170617

What is the process to get Tomcat 8.5 included with Ubuntu 17.10 or 18.04?

[Ross Coleman (rossco85)]

I'd be interested in helping with packaging and testing Tomcat 8.5. I have been a Debian and Ubuntu user, and I have work experience with Java and Tomcat, as well as C++, Python, JavaScript, and a little bit of BASH scripting. I've never helped with packaging for a Linux distro.

[Nish Aravamudan (nacc)]

Hello Ross, thanks for filing this request.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tomcat8/+bug/1662654

documents the necessary steps to get tomcat8.5 into the archive. Note it's still irrelevant (and blocked) for 17.10, but we do need to resolve it for 18.04.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.