Unable to complete the scan for annotations for web application

[Bill Phillips <wi...@gmail.com>]

I am upgrading from Tomcat 7.0.x to 8.5.5

I receive many exceptions related to annotation scanning like so:

Caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: Unable to complete the scan for
annotations for web application [/something] due to a StackOverflowError.
Possible root causes include a too low setting for -Xss and illegal cyclic
inheritance dependencies. The class hierarchy being processed was
[org.jaxen.util.AncestorAxisIterator->org.jaxen.util.AncestorOrSelfAxisIterator->org.jaxen.util.AncestorAxisIterator]

I am not able to modify the dependency chain leading me to this, so I
googled up a couple of possible fixes that didn't work for me:

1. Attempted to disable jar scanning with a <JarScanner> tag with "false"
to all scan types in conf/context.xml:

<JarScanner scanAllDirectories="false" scanAllFiles="false"
scanClassPath="false" scanBootstrapClassPath="false" />


2. Added all of the jars associated with org.jaxen.util to
"tomcat.util.scan.StandardJarScanFilter.jarsToSkip"
in conf/catalina.properties

These jars were jaxen and xom, which were already excluded from scan by the
8.5.5 defaults.



Does anyone have a suggestion of what I might try?



Bill