The tomcat ebuild creates a tomcat user with the home directory set to /dev/null. This creates problems with applications like ActiveBPEL because they use the home directory of the tomcat user as the initial path to their log files. Hence, I see errors of the form cannot java.io.FileNotFoundException: /dev/null/AeBpelEngine/deployment-logs/aeDeployment.log (Not a directory) The home directory for the tomcat user should be set to something like /opt/tomcat5 Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
Tomcat 5.0.28 does not install to /opt/tomcat5 any more. Also your suggestion does not work with upgrades because the home directory would be dependent on the version. The goal of the new setup is to be able to run different Tomcat major versions at the same time. Maybe we could modify ${HOME} in the init script, but I need to check how allowed that kind of tricks are.
You can now use emerge --config to change the home directory of the tomcat user and at the end of the emerge the ebuild says you can run emerge --config to change the home directory. If you have a better solution then reopen this bug. I don't want to force anything on users that have already manually changed the home directory.