[pmwiki-users] Permissions corrupt after update to Mavericks

[Petko Yotov]

fred cummins writes:
> I just updated to the new Mac OS X Mavericks.  Then things started to get  
> funky with pmwiki.
>
> Some pages with lots of content suddenly started showing up blank.  So I went  
> hunting.

What is your PHP version, and what is your PmWiki version?

Recent PHP versions keep changing how things work and we adapt PmWiki when  
we notice a change.

PHP 5.4 contains a change in the htmlspecialchars() function which can cause  
completely blank pages. This should have been mostly fixed since PmWiki  
2.2.42.

PHP 5.4 and 5.5 contain a bug with the iconv() function which can casue  
completely blank pages. This is only detected and dealt with in the latest  
PmWiki 2.2.56.

If you upgrade PmWiki, please read the page

  http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/Upgrades


> Firstly, I noticed that permissions and ownerships were looking bizarre  
> within wiki.d.  Most files had my username as owner, but some (randomly  
> distributed) had _www as owner.  Permissions were also randomly either  
> rw_rw_r__ or rw_r__r__.

PmWiki doesn't come with files in the wiki.d directory. These files are  
created on your own installation by your server, with the permissions of the  
process running PHP.

>From what you describe, I suppose that the PHP process was for some time  
owned by the username _www and for some other period of time by your account  
name. This may happen if you move from one server to another, or if the  
server software was upgraded and the process owners changed.

PmWiki tries to detect if the PHP process is not the same as the owner of  
the current directory, and in that case add RW permissions for the directory  
owner.

> I chowned everything to me, and set all file permissions to 744 (rw_r__r__).  
>  But no luck.
>
> Now I have some files that display fine, and some that don't, and I can't  
> tell the difference between them.  It is just the content of individual pages  
> that is unaccountably failing to display. The sidebar etc shows up fine. If I  
> examine the contents of the files in emacs, I am unable to find any  
> difference between those that display and those that don't.  The content is  
> all there, but not displaying, on only some files.
>
> Has anyone else encountered anything like this, or could anyone suggest where  
> to look next?

If the latest PmWiki version without any modules/recipes works fine, and  
adding a particular recipe/module causes completely blank pages, then that  
module may have to be updated. I suspect the htmlspecialchars() function for  
which recent PmWiki versions have a replacement helper function PHSC() which  
should work better.

Petko