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Re: common, FHS-compliant, default document root for the various web servers



On Wed, Nov 04, 2009 at 07:15:55PM +0100, Jan Hauke Rahm wrote:
> I don't get it. This would of course solve the problem of FHS compliance
> but apart from that it doesn't gain anything, does it?
> Now, do I totally misunderstand the issue here, or are we just moving
> the /var/www problem to /var/lib/www?

No, actually we gain, but it was poorly explained (I've surely
contributed to that).

What I was aiming to is a kind of document root which is under full
control of the package manager; hence where the sysadm cannot touch
anything by hand. That's actually the only way to have a meaningful
package-based namespace.

The property I'd like is that if a package drops static files there
under a dir like package/, then those files automagically appear (in the
default vhost) as http://localhost/package/.

Now, written this way, it looks harder to implement, because it is a
kind of overlay over a default docroot (unless we assume the default
docroot is read-only for the sysadm, which doesn't look reasonable).

I see two solution to this:

- either the final URL is something like
  http://localhost/debian/package/ (replace "debian" with whatever
  prefix you like) and have some other per-web-server mechanism take
  care of adding an Alias/link/whatever from "debian" to that new static
  doc root

- or we add some kind of postinst-time registration mechanism (with all
  the usual drawbacks) that check that new static doc root and register
  every (new) dir there as Alias for the installed web servers. Assuming
  that web servers can register themselves to the mechanism, that would
  also solve the problem that webapp maintainers not necessarily have
  the knowledge of the syntax of all available web servers

Any other idea?

Many thanks for sharpening the analysis, Jan.

Cheers.

PS please keep the -webapps Cc:, I believe it is truly relevant to this
   thread
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..|  .  |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime

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