Basic webapp packaging questions

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I am dealing with an existing webapp package, namely gitweb; I thought
maybe the Debian webapps policy might give some guidance to getting it
to work well out of the box.  Thanks to Charles Plessy for his work so
far in this regard.

Okay, so some questions:

1. What is the standard address for the webapps policy?  I looked in
/usr/share/doc/debian-policy and found nothing, then
http://webapps-common.alioth.debian.org/draft/html/ and found
“Copyright © 2005-2006 The Debian Webapps Team” and “Revision:
DRAFT-1.10”, which left me unconfident that I have the latest version.

Related question: is there a page for the Debian webapps team on
wiki.debian.org?

2. What packages should a webapp depend on?  For a simple CGI
script, would

  apache2 | httpd-cgi

do?  Is there a way to configure a webapp by default for arbitrary
servers providing httpd-cgi?

gitweb installs a configuration file in /etc/apache2/conf.d/gitweb.
Should it additionally Suggests: apache2?

3. How to handle changes in the files that should be served
statically?  I imagine that to avoid installing stray files, some
existing web server configurations might include

   Alias /gitweb.css /usr/share/gitweb/gitweb.css
   Alias /gitweb.js /usr/share/gitweb/gitweb.js
   Alias /git-favicon.png /usr/share/gitweb/git-favicon.png
   Alias /git-logo.png /usr/share/gitweb/git-logo.png

Must there be an entry in NEWS.Debian.gz whenever a new file is added
or a file is moved?  One could avoid that in the future (as upstream
does in current 1.7.2 release candidates) by changing the filesystem
layout to allow

  Alias /static /usr/share/gitweb/static

Unfortunately, removing the old files would break gitweb during
upgrade.  Suggestions?

I also wanted to thank you for the webapps policy and especially for
dbconfig-common.  The standard quality for webapp packages is getting
a lot better.

Jonathan