Re: [gentoo-dev] apache eclass

[Robin H.Johnson <robbat2@gentoo.org>]

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On Thu, Jun 12, 2003 at 10:20:03AM +0100, Tom Payne wrote:
> Also consider what happens if a user uses a webserver other than apache
> (there's rarely anything about a bunch of HTML, PHP, and CGI scripts that's
> apache-specific). There really should be a virtual/httpd to cover this.
I did previously mention that this was needed in the last thread.

> Have a look at http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20642 with regards to
> automatically determining DocumentRoot.
> Synopsis is that a simple grep breaks configurations that use virtual hosts.
> Reliably detecting the doc root on all possible installations is very hard
> indeed.
> After discussion with others, my recommendation is that the document root
> should always be /home/httpd/htdocs. You could allow this to be overridden
> with DOCUMENT_ROOT= in /etc/make.conf if you're feeling generous.
Actually, in a further discussion today in #gentoo-dev, we noted that
detected the DocumentRoot or allowing to be variable in any fashion 
causes more serious problems with tbz2 binary tarballs.

For example:
DocumentRoot is /var/www
User builds a web application, which installs to /var/www. The tbz2
contains files with that pathname component in them.
Now DocumentRoot gets change to /home/httpd/htdocs (any number of ways,
including emerging the binary package on a different system).
User tries to install the package, telling emerge to use the
pre-existing binary.
Package is extracted to /var/www, which is never looked at by the
webserver.

Because of this DocumentRoot must be totally static.
If we ever want DocumentRoot to be variable, somebody has a LOT of work
to do with apache config parsing.

In cases where users want a different DocumentRoot, I would suggest that
the packages are all installed in a fixed location (not nessicarily even
in the DocumentRoot directory), and then the user can symlink them into
their own DocumentRoot.

A possible solution:
All webapps install to something NOT inside DocumentRoot.
'ebuild /usr/portage/.../foo.ebuild config' sets up the application
(needed in most cases already) AND puts in a symlink to the
DocumentRoot.

This also makes it easier to support virtualhost configurations that all
have access to a common tool, and makes temporarily disabling an
application for security reasons much easier to do.

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
E-Mail     : robbat2@orbis-terrarum.net
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