Bug#32263: Splitting CGI-BIN

[Brian White <bcwhite@precidia.com>]

> I don't see any value to letting the guy browsing your website be able
> to tell the difference between local CGI scripts and remote ones though.
> It seems beneficial not to, even, so you can have replace your homebrew
> build of http://example.com/cgi-bin/analog with the prepackaged version,
> without having to do any work or put any thought into it.

User's generally don't care what the URL path is; they seldom even read it.
<webroot>/cgi-bin/analog will be your version while <webroot>/cgi-lib/analog
will be the packaged version.  If you wish to override your personal one with
the packaged one, either change the URL to cgi-lib or create a symlink from
the cgi-bin directory.  A package, however, should never override what a
user has done manually.  That's bad karma.


> Maybe I don't understand the cases where you want to have a link to
> a CGI script in a package, though? Perhaps the real problem comes when
> dealing with subsystems that happen to be operated through CGI scripts --
> linuxconf or similar things do that, don't they? I'm not really seeing any
> cases where that's a nuisance to deal with, but I don't use such things,
> so maybe that's where I'm missing something?

As I see it, the problem breaks down as follows:

 - webmasters want to use <webroot>/cgi-bin for scripts
 - <webroot>/cgi-bin holds scripts from packages in /usr/lib/cgi-bin
 - normal users (including the webmaster) can't write to /usr/lib/cgi-bin
 - so, root is force to:
	- give write access to /usr/lib/cgi-bin (undesireable), or
	- change <webroot>/cgi-bin to ~www-data/cgi-bin, which means
		- apache will always complain about non-standard cgi-bin alias
		- webmaster must symlink scripts from /usr/lib/cgi-bin

I personally find these last two consequences undesireable and difficult to
explain to webmasters.  So, by making all packages use <webroot>/cgi-lib we
can provide a different namespace to package developers and avoid all
conflicts with how webmasters like to do things.

                                          Brian
                                 ( bcwhite@precidia.com )

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