Issue with undeploy when you have symbolic links in the WAR

[Manu George <ma...@gmail.com>]

Hi,
       We allow symbolic links in web applications via the
allowLinking property of tomcat.
http://cwiki.apache.org/GMOxDEV/configure-allowlinking-for-tomcat-contexts.html
A problem with using symbolic links currently in WAR files is that
during undeployment the deployer follows the links and deletes the
files that we link to. This is not an optimal behaviour.
A google search found that java does not provide a fool proof way of
detecting symlinks. However we can check for the canonical and
absolute paths and figure out symbolic links in unix/linux. Not sure
about windows/OSX. Anyway on windows we discourage enabling linking
support so we may not need to consider that case.

Tomcat Manager also has this problem. This is documented as
[Bug 39226] - Manager app deletes contents of symbolic links on
undeploy. However the tomcat community has marked it as won't fix.

How does the community feel we should address this issue?

Regards
Manu