[Pmwiki-users] pmwiki 2.0.beta8 released

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Mon Dec 13 11:17:30 CST 2004


On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 06:39:16PM +0100, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> >This release also changes PmWiki to default to "?n=" style urls 
> >instead of the PATH_INFO format (".../Main/HomePage") urls that were 
> >previously the default.  
> 
> Is there a place where I can see a list of environments where the
> PATH_INFO form won't work?

Not really -- if I had such a list then I could program it directly into 
PmWiki so that it would automatically make the correct choice.  But
there are way too many (undetectable) configuration options that affect
it.  Here's a bit of what I've encountered in the past...

In general PATH_INFO works on Apache 1.3.x that haven't been modified with
special "security" features.  PATH_INFO usually doesn't work on Apache 2.0 
unless the "AcceptPathInfo on" directive is set.  Depending on the
apache 2.0 configuration the AcceptPathInfo may or may not be allowed
in a per-directory .htaccess file, but regardless there's no programmatic
method for a PHP script to determine if PATH_INFO will work (short of
issuing an extra page request to the webserver).

IIS usually doesn't support PATH_INFO without making some obscure
administrative settings to enable it, and even then it appears to
be closely related to the exact minor version of IIS you happen to be 
running.

Even if your webserver configuration does support PATH_INFO, different
versions and configurations of the PHP interpreter may process it 
differently.  I've run across several webhosting environments where 
PATH_INFO was filled with the path to the PHP script being executed 
and not the portion of the url following the script name, in clear 
violation of the CGI specification.  PHP's default handling of 
PATH_INFO also changed a few times between 4.1.0 and 4.3.0 (partially
in response to fundamental server changes introduced by Apache 2.0).

The easiest way to know if it's going to work in any particular
environment appears to be to try it and see, and perhaps play with
a few configuration options.  In Apache one can also often use mod_rewrite
to rewrite .../Main/PageName urls into the ?n= format (assuming, of
course, that mod_rewrite is enabled).

Hope this helps,

Pm



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