[Pmwiki-users] Working toward a cleaner install process

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Sun Oct 3 11:11:58 CDT 2004


As most of you know, one of PmWiki's selling points is its ease of
installation.  However, there have always been a few areas where
admins have run into difficulties arising from the many different
operating systems, PHP versions, web server configurations, etc.  
I'm wanting to eliminate these difficulties.  

Unfortunately, I only have a limited number of test platforms on 
which I can easily test the installation process.  Thus I need help 
from volunteers to run through "from scratch" installs of PmWiki 2 on 
environments they use and let me know where it burps.  I especially 
need help with the installation process on Windows-based servers, and 
web-hosting services that run with safe_mode enabled.

My goal is to have the installation procedure at a point where a new 
administrator can download, install, and execute the common features 
of PmWiki without encountering problems or having to download/enable
environment-specific scripts just to get basic features to work properly.

The areas where people have traditionally run into problems with
installation:

1.  $EnablePathInfo (i.e., "/Main/WikiSandbox" versus 
    "?pagename=Main.WikiSandbox").
2.  Getting passwords to work properly
3.  Having page history work properly (environments in safe_mode or
    no external "diff" package available)
4.  Other safe_mode restrictions
5.  Enabling uploads/attachments

What I'd like to do is to have people download the latest development
release of PmWiki 2 (http://www.pmwiki.org/pub/pmwiki-devel), create
a fresh installation somewhere on their server/hosting environment,
and make sure that each of the above works *without* having to set
variables in a configuration file (beyond enabling uploads, which are
disabled by default) or perform other workarounds.
http://pmichaud.com/pmwiki2/pmwiki.php/Development/InstallTest describes
a set of steps to follow to test the installation process, and what to
look for and report.

If any problems are encountered during a fresh install, I'd like a 
description of the problem, the versions of the OS, webserver, and PHP 
used, and if possible a URL to the site showing where the problem
occurs.  Problems can be reported back to pmwiki-users, to 
http://www.pmwiki.org/PITS, or to pmichaud at pobox.com.

Many thanks in advance,

Pm



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