JCharset with Tomcat 5.5

I use JCharset to get some additional character sets, including UTF 7 and GSM DEFAULT. While it was trivial to setup in development (where I launch Tomcat from an ant task with all sorts of parameters), it was a different story in production where I’m using the default Debian Etch install of Tomcat 5.5. It was very picky about where the JCharset.jar file went: it didn’t like in:

• WEB-INF/lib
• jre/lib (which has Sun’s charset.jar)
• /var/lib/tomcat5.5/shared/lib

It has to go in:

/usr/share/tomcat5.5/endorsed

No errors or anything came up: it just didn’t load. I didn’t notice until I saw 404’s on the missing pages.