Re: [be] Bibledit 4.0 packaged for Ubuntu - testing requested

[Peter von Kaehne]

Teus Benschop wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-12-28 at 11:42 +0000, Peter von Kaehne wrote:
> > On a multiuser machine, i do not think it is appropriate to use /var/www
> > for what is essentially communication from me to myself (in terms of
> > xiphos/bibletime/git or to selected and chosen others. I would think
> > that such stuff should run via the ~user directory.
>
> Some observations / questions on this one:
>
> 1. I tried accessing the home pages through Apache on Ubuntu 9.10, and
> this is what it says:
> Not Found
> The requested URL /~teus was not found on this server.
> Apache/2.2.12 (Ubuntu) Server at localhost Port 80
>
> What would the user or the bibledit installation script need to do to
> enable this function? By default serving homepages through apache seems
> to be switched off in Ubuntu and most likely other distributions too.


Apache 2 has a module userdir which needs to be enabled. This is done by 
creating in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled a link to the relevant 2 files in 
../mods-provided.

Apache 1 simply uncomments something in its conf file.

lighttpd again needs a mod enabled

All three need restart.

I personally use mostly lighttpd as it is neat and does what I want. So 
suddenly Apache hogging port 80 would not be nice. Particularly as the 
settings are hardcoded into cpp and a recompile would be necessary to 
change this (I tried this yesterday and fell onto my face, revealing my 
lack of programming knowledge)

> A script that enables the functionality for Apache or other servers
> would help here.

ok

> 2. Are there any machines, used for Bible translation, that really run
> multiple users who are all translating and thus sharing their local web
> server?

As I said, I am using preferentially lighttpd in my machine and many 
others do so too. It is not about sharing a server to translate jointly 
or separately but simply sharing a computer with potential joint logins. 
Or about having other things running too and needing/wanting port 80.

Think e.g. university computers, unix based and with user accounts + X 
logins. Many SIL people work in unis.

Up to this point one could compile and install bibledit in one's own 
local ~/bin  but with these changes things will start to go pearshape.

Or us CrossWire lot (and comparable people) - we will often have all 
kinds of servers already running, tomcat, whatever to work on stuff and 
working with USFM is only a part of what we do.

> While I agree that bibledit should not dictate apache, does the user
> have a choice in e.g. Ubuntu to install another php and server push
> capable web server apart from Apache? Bibledit uses both of these
> technologies for sending and receiving messages. Server pushing
> technology is relatively new, and I am not sure how many web servers
> support this.

Are you doing more than running a php script in response to something 
received? lighttpd can do so. Others can do so too. I will later today 
try out whether it works and report back.

> > So making openssh a package dependency in ubuntu, but not at build time
> > appears to me the right way forward and a simple warning that no
> > webserver appears to be running should be all that bibledit does about

> This test was now removed from the ./configure script as it appeared to
> look for php-cli, not php itself which would have been enough. Other
> ways of testing the php-capability of the servers would need to be
> invented. Any thoughts?

I think this should be not the matter of bibledit but of the packager 
and should be resolved by setting dependencies accordingly. At the most 
I would expect bibledit to put up a notice "without A,B,C installed and 
running following capabilities are not there". You could do this by 
sending a message to self and see if it arrives. If not bibledit knows 
it needs to put up a message.

Within Ubuntu many packages will not offer full functionality without 
others present - Lyx's version control e.g. relies on svn installed.

Some of these runtime dependencies are crucial some less so. Depending 
on the level of necessity Ubuntu/Debian offer a graduated system of 
dependency - IIRC straight dependency. recommendation and suggestion.

Straight dependency would be sqlite and gtk libraries, recommendation 
SSH, suggestion Apache, Lighttpd or other PHP coapable server. Or a 
variation on this.

I am sure Suse and Redhat have a similar graduated set of levels, though 
I do not know.

On Windows you are anyway in a different world and I guess the installer 
 creater will simply package Apache into the installer. Not many will 
have anything webserver like running.

The other aspect is the whole hardcoded-ness of it all.  Some user 
accounts are located in ~/Public, others in ~/public_html, depending on 
distro.

OpenBSD will deploy the webserver in its own chroot (and it will be 
apache 1) and have its user directories under /var/www/users/~$USER (and 
the main directory under /var/www/htdocs).

At a minimum location of directories and ports used should be user 
configurable.

Yours

Peter