Recently, I've been importing some packages into the pkgsrc tree (not
quite ready yet, but that's just the nicety of awaiting the original
authors approval :).

Anyway, I found that in each case, it was very desirable (and in one case
_required_) to have a webserver installed, html or CGI was an integral
part of the package. So, I put a DEPENDS on apache in the Makefiles.

Possible situations I can see :

(1) Apache is not installed.

    Apache gets installed in the default locations, package gets installed
    putting html/cgi into default locations (currently
    /usr/libexec/cgi-bin and /usr/pkg/share/httpd/htdocs)

(2) Apache is installed and DocumentRoot or CGI dirs have not been
    redefined.

    Package gets installed putting html/cgi into default locations.

Both (1) & (2) are expected behaviours ideal for any novice user.

(3) Apache is installed and DocumentRoot/CGI have been redefined.

    Oh, what do we do. Well, one could argue that if you want to tweak
    the knobs away from the default and not let the packages system know,
    then you should expect packages that depend on this location to
    fail to install. This is fair, but doesn't handle the more technical
    users very nicely.

To rectify situation (3), I would propose a convention of two variables
which may be defined (/etc/mk.conf being the obvious location).
say, APACHEDOCUMENTROOT, and APACHECGIBIN. Any program that needs these
would default to the apache default locations if they were undefined. When
people modified their apache configs however, they could redefine these
variables in /etc/mk.conf so that future installs would find the right
place.

I would also propose a patch to the apache conf files to state this so
that people know that these variables exist, and where to define them

Thoughts ?

Cheers,

Al




--
Alan Horn - Sysadmin - Dreamworks (+1 818 695 6256) - ahorn@anim.dreamworks.com
   Show me an Ethernet collision and I'll show you a network that could do 
                          with one user fewer - BOFH