Bug#769594: jenkins-tomcat: jenkins won't start, config option to make symlinks work seems broken with tomcat8

[Roman Jurkech]

Package: jenkins-tomcat
Version: 1.565.3-2
Severity: grave

Dear Maintainer,

I did clean install of stable, updated to testing, installed jenkins-tomcat and related packages.

When trying to start jenkins from tomcat manager screen I get: FAIL - Application at context path /jenkins could not be started

Digging through tomcat logs I found series of errors but they seem to start with this one (showing first 5 lines):

14-Nov-2014 21:43:35.502 SEVERE [localhost-startStop-1] org.apache.tomcat.util.digester.Digester.startElement Begin event threw exception
 java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.naming.resources.FileDirContext
        at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:366)
        at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:355)
        at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)

The error right after clears things a bit:

14-Nov-2014 21:43:35.504 SEVERE [localhost-startStop-1] org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.processContextConfig Parse error in context.xml for /jenkins
 org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; systemId: file:/etc/tomcat8/Catalina/localhost/jenkins.xml; lineNumber: 7; columnNumber: 91; Error at (7, 91) : org.apache.naming.resources.FileDirContext

It seems like the option from the config file which is supposed to make symlinks work is no longer valid with tomcat8.
I was looking through tomcat documentation and the class mentioned there existed in tomcat7 but doesn't exist in tomcat8.
Could there be some new class which should be used or a differnet way to enable support for symlinks? 
I did some googling on this but couldn't find anything that I could work with.
I tried also removing the option altogether which made jenkins start but it was unusable, jsut throwing more errors of different kind.

Grave severity seemed like the right one because jenkins simple wouldn't start at all and is just unusable. I hope I'm making the right call here.

Thank you in advance,

Roman Jurkech

-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers testing-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'testing-updates'), (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages jenkins-tomcat depends on:
ii  jenkins-common  1.565.3-2
ii  tomcat8         8.0.14-1

jenkins-tomcat recommends no packages.

jenkins-tomcat suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information