Problems with tomcat install and instructions...

[Tim Gilbert <tg...@Basement.com>]

Hi.  I've just had a very frustrating time trying to get tomcat working, and
I 
thought I'd send a message to the list to give a little feedback.

It turns out that the main problem I was having was that the .tar
distributions 
at http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/tomcat/release/v3.1_beta_1/src/ are
truncated.
(The .zip file is fine, but the .tar.Z and .tar.gz versions are only about
halfway 
present.)  Oddly enough, it appears that the .tar files were corrupted and
then 
correctly gzipped...  Anyways, this ought to be corrected, I think.

There were a few ancillary problems to this.  The diagnostics from ant were
quite 
rudimentary.  Running ant on the truncated distribution resulted in an error
message 
similar to "srcdir does not exist".  It would be nice to have ant report the

line/column number of build.xml where the command failed, and even report
filenames 
that don't exist.

I would have felt more comfortable about building and installing jakarta if
there 
had been some installation instructions online, especially the
Tomcat+Apache-HOWTO.

My main problem, and the thing that has me stymied right now, is installing
mod_jserv.
I have been totally unable to find the source for this file on the jakarta
web site 
anywhere.  (I did find NT and Linux binaries, which are no help since I'm
running 
Solaris 2.7.  Even if I was running Linux, though, I'd want to download the
source 
and compile it myself.)

Is there something I'm missing?  Especially, is this the same mod_jserv as
the 
one in the Apache JServ project (and if not, why doesn't it have a different
name,
like mod_jakarta)?

I hope I don't sound like I'm griping, which isn't my intention.  I'm
excited about 
the prospect of playing around with Tomcat, but my interest is more in
developing 
servlets than setting up the build environment, so I'm a little frustrated
by the 
time I've had to spend on that end of things so far.  Any advice would be
apreciated.

Thanks very much...

Tim

--
Tim Gilbert                     [not speaking for]
Basement.com