BugRat Report #170 has been filed.

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Bug report #170 has just been filed.

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REPORT #170 Details.

Project: Tomcat
Category: Bug Report
SubCategory: New Bug Report
Class: swbug
State: received
Priority: high
Severity: serious
Confidence: public
Environment: 
   Release: Tomcat 3.1
   JVM Release: 1.2.2
   Operating System: Solaris
   OS Release: 2.6
   Platform: Unix

Synopsis: 
Tomcat 3.1 uses classes from inappropriate classpath

Description:
We recently upgraded our version of Tomcat 3.1.  We had 
actually been running 3.1 for awhile, but discovered that 
changes had been made to the release being offered by 
apache.org, even though the version number hadn't been 
changed.  Indeed, some of the changes proved very 
deleterious.  Under the previous release of Tomcat 3.1, 
I had been able to run parallel versions of a servlet off 
the same running copy of the servlet engine: a 
production version and a development version. 
The two servlet versions use classes with identical names 
but residing of course in different locations.  
(The production version is accessed via 
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/xdlib/servlet/... 
and the development version via 
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/xdlibdev/servlet/...)  
The previous release of Tomcat 3.1 had no problem keeping 
these two versions of my servlet sorted out; it activated 
the proper classes from the proper classpath for the 
version of the servlet which the URL indicated.  
But under the new version of Tomcat 3.1, this has changed.  
If a user invokes the xdlibdev servlet (my development 
servlet), Tomcat will now use classes from the 
xdlib/servlet classpath (the production servlet classpath) 
if these are already loaded! In other words, it now seems 
only to pay attention to the package and class names, not 
to the classpath that is associated with a servlet when 
loading classes for use. Surely this can't be considered a 
feature!