Comment 1 for bug 294277

The "Catalina" directory gets installed when you install one of the applications packages (tomcat6-examples, tomcat6-docs, tomcat6-admin...). But you're right, it should be created by the tomcat6 package itself.

The question of making that directory writable by the tomcat6 user is a question of security/policy/feature tradeoff... So far we made the choice of not allowing Tomcat 6 to modify files below /etc by itself (and by doing so, we break some of the admin webapps features). However I didn't thought we were breaking autodeployment.

Just to be clear, by "autodeploying" you mean put WAR files into the appBase directory ? I thought tomcat would unpack those, but not copy the context.xml file to conf/Catalina/localhost.