I logged a bug a couple of days ago:
http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=39218
Since nobody gave any response, I wanted to ping the list.
The current implementation of the server, common and shared class
loaders use the catalina.properties file to make the group of
repositories which are searched for classes configurable.
Unfortunately the order of repositories in the entries is not respected.
Instead they are rearranched into packed (jar files), unpacked (class
directories) and a URL list. Then all unpacked are searched first, after
that all jars and at the end all URLs.
A typical user would understand the configuration lines in
catalina.properties as an analogy to the usual classpath of the system
classloader. And I think that's intended. He would rely on the fact,
that the order of entries is respected by the class loader. So he will
order his patches etc. in the most obvious way. We throw away the order
and rearrange via undocumented rules.
I attached a patch to bugzilla adding another signature to the creation
of the classloader, allowing to pass in all repositories in the correct
order. It's not a major redesign of the loading, because I want to keep
the risk of breaking something minimal.
Any comments?
An example:
The tomcat product deployer might add a patch into
CATALINA_HOME/server/classes (they don't want to overwrite the original
jar files and adding them into server/lib is no way, since there is no
way of knowing, in which order *.jar will be evaluated).
The application project team prepares an instance in CATALINA_BASE and
deploys a newer version or a collection of patches as a jar file into
CATALINA_HOME/server/lib.
They prepare a catalina.properties file with
server.loader=${catalina.base}/server/lib/*.jar,\
${catalina.home}/server/classes,\
${catalina.home}/server/lib/*.jar
Their version of the patch will not be loaded, because we regroup the
entries and ${catalina.home}/server/classes will come first!
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