Metacat

There is some confusion about the act of re-deploying the metacat.war file in the tomcat servlet container and the impact that this can have on a customized metacat.properties file. When redeploying, the default metacat.properties file from the war file overwrites the deployed version, possibly reverting property values. This is unexpected. We should explain in the install documentation how to avoid this issue when deploying, either by backing up the customized metacat.properties file and restoring it after the redeploy, or by modifying the source properties file in metacat/lib/metacat.properties when building the war file.

We may also want to consider how to protect the metacat.properties file during a re-deploy or an upgrade. This might be accomplished by storing the properties file under a different name and making sure its not lost upon redeployment.