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

[Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org>]

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 6:50 AM, sean finney <seanius@debian.org> wrote:

> personally, beyond the aesthetically displeasing name, i'm really
> skeptical that this will accomplish anything useful.
>
> * most apps require extra config and splitting out of stuff into other
>  directories for fhs compliance anyway, thus requiring some level of
>  webserver configuration, meaning this adds no benefit (beyond 1 line
>  fewer in the server config).
> * this encourages a "working in unconfigured state" for packages, which
>  seems very sketchy wrt security (similarly, to apps dropping random
>  publically executable scripts in /usr/lib/cgi-bin.
>
> tbh this seems closer to the "solution looking for a problem" rather than
> the other way around.

I have to agree with sean here.

I'd instead like to see each webapp come with stuff to make a
sysadmin's life easier:

Support for multiple independent instances configured to use arbitrary
locations for data/configuration, arbitrary vhosts and arbitrary
sub-paths of those vhosts.

Scripts that can be used to setup an instance, configure it and
register it with the package and with the available and
sysadmin-selected web servers.

Support for automatically upgrading the database structures (or
similar) for each registered instance when the package is upgraded.
This could include backups of the pre-upgrade data, disabling the
instance during the upgrade process and other things.

Ways to easily relocate an instance; between directories on one server
and between servers.

And my personal nitpick; PHP should be off by default so that php
scripts in configured data locations are not executed by web servers
by default. PHP files/dirs in webapp packages should be whitelisted
for execution rather than each webapp needing to blacklist their
configured data locations.

I imagine DSA have a couple of things that could be added to the above wishlist.

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise