Re: Web applications specific issues
* sean finney (seanius@debian.org) disait :
> > What do you mean exactly? In the Bugzilla package, there are a set
> > templates files which have to be shipped with the package. I have a bug
> > report against the fact that when you customize those files, you will
> > lose your changes whenever you upgrade the package.
> >
> > What would you answer to the bug submitter?
>
> this is slightly different problem. if the user is *expected* to modify
> a file, it shouldn't be in /usr/share in the first place, or at least
> marked as a conffile.
Yes, so, basically, the question is:
Should we consider the templates (and other static files) customizable?
The more I think about that issue, the more I think we should not.
> agreed. i think the alternate solution would be to tell them to
> rsync a copy of the tree into /usr/local and manage it themselves.
Yes. That sounds decent. I like the idea to provide a set of read-only
static files and to provide a set of documentation (and maybe a debconf
note) about the way to customize those files (with copying it elsewhere).
> i think much of this could be addressed simply by providing the
> stylesheets/templates/etc as conffiles.
Hmmm... I don't think that's a good idea.
Let me take bugzilla again as an example.
Templates changed a lot between 2.16 and 2.18. If I provided it as
conffiles, user would be overkilled by merging questions when upgrading from
2.16 to 2.18, even if he didn't changed anything in the templates.
That's a nonsense to me, to ask for a merge in such a situation
(templates should simply overwritten here).
That's why I think static files should not be conffiles.
Do you see why I said that the "templates" issue is not that easy to solve ;)
> > - Provide /usr/share/cgi-bin and update the policy to allow arch
> > independant files to go there.
>
> unfortunately, that won't work because you can't alias /cgi-bin to two
> directories, and it's likely that a web server will have both.
> there's a bug report on this that's like 3 years old.
Indeed, I wasn't aware of that.
> > - Allow the use of /usr/share/package for hosting arch independant
> > scripts (which is most of the time the case).
>
> yeah, that's along the lines of what i was thinking. still doesn't
> handle an application having both, but that could probably be handled
> better by the packager patching the locations in the webapp.
Ok.
--
Alexis Sukrieh <sukria@sukria.net>
http://www.sukria.net
« Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur. »
Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.
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