Impossible to run tomcat8 on Java 8 on Ubuntu 18.04

[Thomas Mortagne]

I just upgraded from Ubuntu 17.10 to 18.04 and I ended up with a failing instance of Tomcat.

I get the following error in the log

    08-May-2018 20:52:38.487 SEVERE [http-nio-8080-exec-1] org.apache.coyote.AbstractProtocol$ConnectionHandler.process Error reading request, ignored
     java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: java.nio.ByteBuffer.position(I)Ljava/nio/ByteBuffer;
 at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11InputBuffer.init(Http11InputBuffer.java:688)
 at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Processor.service(Http11Processor.java:672)
 at org.apache.coyote.AbstractProcessorLight.process(AbstractProcessorLight.java:66)
 at org.apache.coyote.AbstractProtocol$ConnectionHandler.process(AbstractProtocol.java:790)
 at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.NioEndpoint$SocketProcessor.doRun(NioEndpoint.java:1459)
 at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.SocketProcessorBase.run(SocketProcessorBase.java:49)
 at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1149)
 at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:624)
 at org.apache.tomcat.util.threads.TaskThread$WrappingRunnable.run(TaskThread.java:61)
 at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:748)

This seems to indicate that tomcat8 package has been built using Java 9+ (which contains a breaking change in the return type of ByteBuffer#position method).

I really need to run it with Java 8 in my case (and Tomcat 8 is supposed support Java 8 anyway) but Ubuntu should build it with Java 8 for that (and then it should work just fine in Java 9 too).

Java 8 is still the current LTS version of Java so don't bury it too quickly :)

I don't really have any workaround idea to propose other that not using the standard tomcat8 Ubuntu package and install it "by hand" instead. But then my other issue is that I can't use another debian package which depends on tomcat8 package :)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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