Tomcat6 in Debian?

Question

Could someone explain the status of Tomcat6 in Debian to me? My confusion arises from the fact that I can only find a "source" package in Lenny (the stable release) and a "normal"(?) package in Squeeze (testing release). Applicable links:

http://packages.debian.org/source/lenny/tomcat6

http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/tomcat6

What is the difference between a source package and 'normal' package? Does this just mean I would have to compile tomcat from source in lenny, but squeeze will have it available to install directly from apt-get? I'm also a bit confused as to why squeeze has a java subsection in its package list but lenny doesnt, although I suppose this might just be a new scheme for the new version?

I hope this is programming related enough for SO, didn't seem like it was applicable for ServerFault. Thanks in advance for bearing with my debian newbieness :P

Answer 1

Here is the only package that was built from lenny's tomcat6: libservlet2.5-java. It wasn't indexed from the search page, which sucks.

Answer 2

A piece of software (e.g. Tomcat, apache2, GTK+, the kernel) is converted into a source package. A source package combines the original, unmodified source code (as you would download it from the project's webpage) with the build scripts and modifications needed to create the binary ("normal") packages. A source package can create any number of binary packages, which can be either "arch:any" (every processor architecture will have a different version of the package) or "arch:all" (all architectures will share the package). On the source package pages (the ones with source in the URL in your question) link to all binary packages built.

From a quick look at the dependencies, it should be possible to install the tomcat 6 packages on a lenny system, using the packages from squeeze.

Make sure the following is in your /etc/apt/apt.conf, or in one of the files in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d:

APT::Default-Release "stable";

If /etc/apt/apt.conf does not exist, simply create it.

Next, add the squeeze repositories to your sources.list, possibly using your local mirror:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main non-free contrib
deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main non-free contrib

Now, update the packages and run

apt-get -t testing install tomcat6

This should only pull those packages needed for tomcat6, but be careful because newer versions of other packages might be needed, too, so don't try it out on a production machine.