Re: [gentoo-dev] [GLEP] Web Application Installation

[Max Kalika <max@gentoo.org>]

Chugga chugga chugga! :-)

Quoting Stuart Herbert <stuart@gentoo.org>:

> On Sunday 03 August 2003 4:20 pm, Max Kalika wrote:
>> Correct.  I also create an apache config block as
>> 
>>   /etc/webapps/<application>.conf
> 
> If it's apache-specific, can't we at least call it
> <application>-apache.conf?

You're absolutely right, and in fact this is what the eclass does right now
(as shown by the example I posted earlier).

> Thanks for the example - it helps a great deal.  Now, how would you deal
> with  a site needing to run two copies of horde under the one web server?

Hmm.  This depends on the app.  Some apps have virtual hosting built-in
others do not.  Those that do not, may need some sysadmin intervention,
doing some parallel installs, symlinking, what-have-you.  I think we need
to have a limit to how much we can do at install time and how much we can
configure for the user out-of-the-box.  For example, we don't have any way
of having two postfix instances installed and running on the same box with
the ebuild, but the sysadmin can go ahead and configure the installed
product to achieve the needed functionality. 

> Yeah - but how do you handle sites (like ISPs) that need to run multiple 
> installations of the same app on the same box?  You can't have a single 
> globla configuration file for that.  Makes sense for the home user, but
> not  for ISPs.

Continuing from above, it seems best left to the systems admin in designing
how to implement virtual hosting.  For example, horde has built-in virtual
hosting where you specify multiple servers and the specific one gets chosen
based on the server hostname.  Of course this isn't foolproof as things
like SSL will break it, but in any case, this decision has to be left to
the person installing it. It seems like the gentoo philosophy is to install
the necessary minimum to have a running product and leave the major
tinkering to the admin.  Going back to the postfix example, although the
package has support for delivering mail to LMTP through a content filter
that will scan for spam and viruses, it doesn't do it out of the box and
takes a bit of tinkering to get right.  I'm of the opinion that if someone
wants to set up an ISP, they better know what they're doing and will be
able to figure out how to virtualize the necessary packages they want to
offer to their clients.

> Well, PHP apps'll need to check for which PHP extensions are active from
> time  to time.

Ok.  If there's a lot of language-specific work that needs to be done, then
breaking it up into separate eclasses makes sense, otherwise, I'm worried
about clutter. :)

>> Certainly.  Perhaps if we don't find anything that is language specific
>> (which I have yet to see), we can take a different approach and do
>> webapp-<webservertype>
> 
> See previous emails.  I *really* don't support making any of this stuff 
> webserver-specific in the ebuilds or eclasses ;-)  A two-stage install - 
> ebuilds to get apps onto the machine, user-space tools to install an app
> for  a specific web server - are the way to go, imho.

Fair enough.  So something like "webapp-config <application> <webserver>" ?

> How do you make an app install on (say) Zeus or (say) iPlanet or (say) 
> n.e.other web server if the ebuild itself is server-specific?  We're
> boxing  ourselves in, for no good reason.

No idea.  :-)

> Gentoo's supposed to be about configurability.  It even says so right at
> the  top of www.gentoo.org.  Let's not throw that out of the window just
> yet ;-)

I wouldn't consider it! :-)

--mk

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