Arnout.Kuiper@nl.origin-it.com wrote:
>I have some problems with this patch, in that the directory
>scanner will become a lot more complex, in order to solve
>some kind of mis-configuration of a projects file structure.
>
I agree that the project file structure should not have any recursive
symlinks. If that were all there was to it, I would agree with you 100%.
However:
The situation I am in is I am developing on an old Solaris box, which
doesn't have a web browser (I'm at a university), and it's very useful to be
able to read the various docs and run the various servlets/XSPs etc. that I
have scattered over the filesystem from a remote machine, without having to
physically move/copy them inside the Tomcat folder. (Even if it did have a
web browser I wouldn't use it, because of the lack of ALT+TAB feature over
Exceed, it is a slow machine, and other reasons). The Solaris box is good
for development, useless for web browsing.
So I put some symlinks to root and some other dirs, in
build/tomcat/webapps/ROOT. I don't know whether this is the right thing to
do, but in any case it doesn't seem totally unreasonable and I don't think
people who try this should have to put up with Ant not working without at
least a helpful error message.
Obviously I wouldn't make those links in a production environment because of
security, but this is just for internal development.
This setup caused Ant to go into a loop because it not only scans the
project file structure, it also scans the existing build - which of course
contains the symlinks.
IMO:
1) This qualifies as a bug which needs to be fixed somehow, either by an
error report or by my patch. But outputting an error would probably require
the complexity of my patch anyhow to detect the error.
2) My situation isn't so obscure that the bug is never likely to affect
anyone else. Okay, it is pretty obscure! ;)
To reiterate, although this kind of link in a project structure doesn't make
sense, it does make _some_ kind of sense in the context of using Tomcat.
--
Robin
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