HEADS UP for maintainers of web applications

[Clement Laforet]

On Thu, May 11, 2006 at 02:17:21AM -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
> Pav Lucistnik wrote:
> > Hi people,
> > 
> > it will soon become mandatory to stop installing web applications into
> > Apache specific directories, like ${PREFIX}/www/data,
> > ${PREFIX}/www/cgi-bin etc.
> 
> How did those directories become "apache specific," and where was that
> decision and the prohibitive policy discussed and agreed to?

As Pav said previously, they are installed by apache. We have reasons
to get rid of this:
- Apache is not the unique web server. lighttpd seduces many people 
- Web application are bigger and more complex.
- Where are installed your web apps/front end?
  ${PREFIX}/share/${PORTNAME} like nagios or cacti?
    So you have to hack apache 2* conf. It's far from being 
    intuitive.
  ${PREFIX}/www/data/${PORTNAME}?
    data is not in MTREE...
  ${PREFIX}/www/${PORTNAME}?

I'm also thinking about making apache ports I maintain more flexible 
is the post-install stage, I'd like to see more automated tasks, 
specially for installations of modules, support of mac_bsdextended(4), 
out-of-the-box apache configuration for webapps and such.
With a "strict" hierarchy, we can do it.

OTOH, www/apache22 doesn't support old layout, and many users
complained, because they were stuck with apache2* ports ACL (it's
locked to DocumentRoot which is ${PREFIX}/www/apache22/). This
situation sucks and I'm the one to blame. But I don't think I'll go
back to ${PREFIX}/www/{data,cgi-bin,icons} and its symlinks mess.
I'll surely add a misc/webhier or so to fix this issues, and it will
surely help non-apache webservers ports to provide a coherent web
hierarchy... ... and fix the ugly cgi-bin issue too (cvsweb problems)


clem
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