Very important: This is NOT a build from source, and it never has been. I made a 10 hour attempt at getting it to build from source and gave up. Instead, I added a comment to the description letting the user know this is a binary distribution. I added a lot of dependencies, because many were missing. I kept the file paths pretty much intact, because it was done really well last time. A new dependency, dev-java/commons-launcher required a new ebuild. I submitted this separately. I fixed the init file and conf files to work together. I moved all the files to just files/ not files/<version>. 21tomcat has not changed. Three (3) attachments follow. This has been well tested on x86.
Created attachment 21866 [details] tomcat-5.0.14.ebuild
Created attachment 21867 [details] files/tomcat.conf
Created attachment 21868 [details] files/tomcat.init
NOTE: my dev-java/commons-launcher submission is Bug #35346
Moving this again to java@gentoo.org, so everyone out there can help.
Tomcat 5.0.18 in portage, cheers.