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Re: Web applications



On Fri, Aug 20, 2004 at 07:25:36AM +0200, Peter Palfrader wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Aug 2004, Kai Hendry wrote:
> 
> > Web applications as packages in Debian suck.
> 
> Yes, and they suck even more if they are setup in such a way that you
> can only run one instance of it.  I often find myself installing a

s/setup/written/ typically.  I've noticed that webapp authors typically
don't have much of a grasp of (a) packaging concepts and (b) why you'd want
to run multiple instances of something from one copy of the code.  There's
also the problem that, for webapps, it can be difficult to work out how to
support multiple different configurations from a single copy of the code
securely.  Certainly you can't go with trusting anything the client gives
you, but deciding in a general sense when to use which config can be tough.

> For instance installing a wiki should make it possible to have
> wiki1.example.com, wiki2.example.com which have almost nothing in
> common.  If the package hardcodes paths into /var/foo this is quite
> difficult to make.

PHPWiki makes it relatively simple if you follow the instructions in
README.Debian.  IRM is a royal PITA for this (and basically anything else
installation-related, too, but it's neat and simple, and I know how to use
it and hack it).  I can't speak of too many other webapps -- oh, Diogenes is
getting there, but it's got some ways to go, and MySource is pretty good at
it, but it's grown a lot of complexity in the code to be able to supply it.

- Matt

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