I tried to deploy an web application which is not specified a "Context Path", but Tomcat manager indicated a message "FAIL - Invalid context path was specified". Depend on deployment screen of Tomcat manager, context-path is optional, and one of war, directory url or xml configuration file url is required.
You are correct, pah is required. I have updated trunk and proposed the fix for 6.0.x
This has been fixed in 6.0.x and will be included in 6.0.19 onwards.
*** Bug 49451 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***