webapp-config is a problem

[kwabena]

Hi,

I recently installed a few web applications through portage and ran into a few problems that are probably somewhat solvable:

1) there's no easy way to avoid using webapp-config
-- there should be a webapp-config USE flag
-- when not selected, web apps should just install to /usr/share as they would with webapp-config, letting the user copy the dir as she pleases
-- what's the vhost use flag for? I thought it was just for this purpose.

2) webapp-config help message is misleading/unclear
-- from looking at the output of webapp-config, I thought I could uninstall a program with webapp-config -C app-name version. This turned out to be wrong, but the only indication of what was wrong was an error message about the app not being installed in my http root. I found the answer to my question in the man page, all the way at the bottom near the examples. What I propose for this is that webapp-config's output (with no args, or with -h/?) also mention those example lines, or at least in some way mention the -h -d parts that -C requires.

3) having portage automatically install apps with webapp-config is a security risk: apps were just getting placed in my root http directory when I wasn't ready for them to be put there. An attacker could have accessed unprepared/unprotected/incompletely installed/untrusted code in through my web server. What I like to do is test and configure my web applications before putting them on a live web-server. What I propose for this is that portage not automatically install web-apps, the auto install portion of the install could be put into the emerge config section of www-app ebuilds, and a message could be displayed instructing the user on how to use it (ala-postgresql's ebuild)

Anyone have some ideas on this? Should I send an ebuild to the maintainer with these suggestions?


Thanks

[darken]

I have only one question: are you sure your vhosts flag is set?