[pmwiki-users] PmWiki work directory, re-revisited

christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com
Sat Feb 3 06:40:56 CST 2007


On Fri, 2 Feb 2007, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> Back in December I brought up a thread [1] regarding a dedicated "work 
> directory" for PmWiki scripts.  There were many useful suggestions and 
> comments... and then I left for vacation and was too distracted with 
> holidays.  :-)

Good for you!

> [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.wiki.pmwiki.user/36932

> There are some nice advantages to having a single top-level writable 
> directory.  For one, it means never changing permissions on the pmwiki/ 
> directory itself -- one simply sets permissions on this data directory. 
> It also means that the top-level writable directory can be part of the 
> distribution, and clearly labeled as such.  Lastly, it means we need 
> only one .htaccess file to protect the contents of the writable 
> directory.
>
> The structure would be something like:
>
>    pmwiki/
>      pmwiki.php        # main PmWiki script
>      cookbook/         # directory for cookbook scripts
>      data.d/           # top-level writable directory
>        wiki.d/         # page file storage
>        work.d/         # temporary/work files
>      docs/             # basic documentation
>      local/            # local customizations
>      ...etc...

What about uploads/, pub/cache/ etc?

I also would prefer 'var.d' or 'var' instead of 'data'. In the *nix wold 
that means something, e.g. that you should be aware that applications 
write data to it, so it might consume disk space.

Btw, wouldn't it be possible that a PmWiki creates some many, and big, 
pages that the partition gets full?  What would happen if I wrote a script 
that started creating pages at pmwiki.org? (Besides you being angry with 
me of course :-)

> As far as handling the change for existing sites, we could take a number 
> of different approaches:
>
> 1.  Require system administrators to migrate wiki.d/ into the data.d/
>    directory when upgrading to 2.2.0(-beta).  This is actually not all
>    that onerous -- it simply requires moving wiki.d/ into the data.d/
>    directory, or if that's not feasible then copying wiki.d/ into the
>    data.d/ directory and setting permissions.
>
> 2.  Allow existing sites to continue to use wiki.d/ at the PmWiki level,
>    and use data.d/work.d/ for work files.  The software would
>    automatically use wiki.d/ at the root if it exists and there's not a
>    data.d/wiki.d/ directory.
>
> 3.  Try to come up with a way to have PmWiki quickly move the contents
>    of wiki.d/ into data.d/ (perhaps via a special action run by the
>    administrator).
>
> 4.  Other?

As long as we provide good (clear, detailed) instructions for how to 
migrate I think it will be ok. However, options 1 (and possibly 3) might 
imply that it is a rather bigger change than just going to 2.2.

Other than that, as an administrator I wouldn't care that much. Since I 
run things from SVN, let me know when/how a change will happen and I'll 
help you test it out.

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr


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