Re: Possible MBF wrt common, FHS-compliant, default document root for the various web servers
Le Sat, Nov 07, 2009 at 03:23:22PM +0100, Jan Hauke Rahm a écrit :
>
> I still see a problem with the upgrade path for existing installations.
> I might be wrong but I think the most difficult cases are very custom
> setups with lots of changes by the local admin. I'm thinking of e.g.
> webmail.domain.tld being a virtual host with DocRoot
> /usr/share/squirrelmail. If the files there move to
> /usr/share/www/squirrelmail we break a lot of setups. So, what about
> shipping a symlink from the old location to the new one as a migration
> path? This doesn't solve the very default (e.g. users accessing
> squirrelmail via localhost/squirrelmail) but that is so easily solved
> via alias directive or symlink that I suppose a NEWS.Debian entry would
> fit best here.
> What do you say?
Dear Hauke,
As a maintainer of a web application, I share your worries. I never had any
user request to make it work out of the box with alternative web servers, so I
guess that my users have nothing to gain and everything to lose in a change. I
strongly suggest that the transition is experimented on a few volunteer
packages before increasing the workload of many persons – users and developers.
For new packages, grouping everything in /usr/share/www sounds like a good
idea. The alias name, « vendor », I find a bit disturbing because we do not
sell anything. But picking the name will be the priviledge of the Do-o-crat who
will lead the transition, I presume.
Still, having /usr/share/www as a document root does not prevent complex
packages to be fragmented between /usr/share, /usr/lib/cgi-bin/, /var/lib/,
/var/tmp, /var/run and /etc. Maybe you can double-check how many web servers
are able to cope with that before starting to invest a lot of time. Otherwise,
since shipping configuration files in /etc/webserver/conf.d will still be
necessary for these packages to work, there will little benefit in moving files
to /usr/share/www.
Anyway, thank you very much for your initiative. Exploring new directions is good !
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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