manual tomcat install versus apt

[Thierry Carrez]

Thufir wrote:
> On Sun, 18 Jan 2009 19:59:32 -0500, John DeCarlo wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 1:49 AM, Thufir <hawat.thufir at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>  why don't the apt-get commands at:
>>> https://help.ubuntu.com/8.10/serverguide/C/tomcat.html
>>> script the install process which the howtogeek site lays out?  Is there
>>> a security concern which the help.ubuntu.com directions are trying to
>>> address?
>>>
>> I ran into this issue years ago.  I could never get a useful answer and
>> gave up.  Besides, you get access to a newer version if you install by
>> hand.

If the howto you refer to is [1] then it was written even before the
Tomcat 6 packages were added to Ubuntu. It details how to download a
Tomcat binary from the Apache website and manually deploy it under Ubuntu.

[1] http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/linux/installing-tomcat-6-on-ubuntu/

The instructions in the server guide [2] are about installing the
tomcat6 package from the Ubuntu repositories. You then benefit from the
bugfixes and updates that we provide to our repositories contents. It's
also so much simpler to just run "sudo apt-get install tomcat6".

[2] https://help.ubuntu.com/8.10/serverguide/C/tomcat.html

The security concern would be that if your manual install is affected by
a vulnerability (which is the case for the 6.0.14 recommended in your
howto) you have to learn about it and update the software manually. By
using the official Ubuntu packages you get the security fixes in the
regular update process.

Regards,

-- 
Thierry Carrez
Ubuntu server team || Canonical Ltd.