All, This may be a waste of time, but it's worth suggesting IMO.
We have lots of users who try to upgrade between major versions of Tomcat by simply installing the new Tomcat somewhere, copying their configuration over (primarily server.xml), dumping their webapps into webapps/, starting the server, and then running to the users' list when it doesn't work. I was thinking that we could add a "version" attribute to server.xml's <Server> element that could allow Tomcat to bomb on startup if the version wasn't correct/compatible. Such a version string could be as simple as "5.5" or "6.0" or whatever. It could also track the actual release version "6.0.32", or even be something more opaque like Java's class file version numbering. A server reading an incompatible configuration file (almost always a newer version of Tomcat reading an ancient version of the file) could complain with an error message a reference to the documentation about how to properly upgrade Tomcat. Does anything think: 1) This would actually help people? You get a nice error message instead of ClassNotFoundExceptions and warnings about unrecognized property names and stuff. 2) This would be a total PITA because you have to go find the magic version string for your new Tomcat version? The intent would be to have the version string /already/ in the server.xml that ships with Tomcat. 3) This could help us when we have to introduce some semi-breaking change to server.xml without a major release bump. In these cases, the warning could be something like "There are incompatibilities between your version of server.xml and this version of Tomcat: please see [url-to-incompatible-property-docs] for more info" instead of "go see the upgrade documentation". This kind of thing is probably too late for TC 7, but TC 8 could implement it pretty trivially. -chris
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