Minor version upgrading

[Dave Ford <ab...@bath.ac.uk.INVALID>]

Hello,

We've running many instances of Tomcat 8.5 on some dozens of linux
servers.  All of this is being managed by Puppet using the puppetforge
tomcat module.

The Puppet module that deploys tomcat simple checks to see if the
NOTICE file is the correct place to determine whether or not it should
unpack a provided tarball into Catalina_home. 

My question is this - as we've gone and placed our catalina_base folder
within a subfolder of catalina_home, we're not going to want to simply
delete the C_H folder to reinstall a newer version.

Is it safe/sane to unpack a new minor release (say 8.5.40) over the
existing installation of (8.4.32) over an existing Catalina_Home?

Or should I simply bite the bullet, rework my puppet code to deploy the
instances outside of Catalina_Home and wipe C_H before redeploying it
with a  newer version?

Regards,
Dave