[pkg-lighttpd] Bug#642604: Bug#642604: lighttpd always binds to IPv6 on TCP port 80

Adam Nielsen a.nielsen at shikadi.net
Thu Sep 29 05:25:36 UTC 2011


> I discussed your bug report with Olaf and we came to the conclusion that
> having core settings like server and socket setup in
> conf-available/-enabled is the wrong approach. This setup is merely for
> module setup and configuration for our own and other package
> maintainer's modules.
>
> We just can't move out every single bit of possible configuration to
> such separate files, especially not core settings. Where should that
> end? Especially since IPv6 is/was a Squeeze release goal and has thus to
> be enabled anyway.

That's a fair point, and to explain my reasoning in a bit more detail, 
my problem is that I want to leave the Debian-specific parts of the 
configuration alone.  At the moment there is one config file that sets 
everything, from Debian-specific options like log and pidfile paths to 
generic options like index-file names, as well as user-configurable 
options like listening port numbers.

The problem is then when someone wants to change a non-Debian option 
(like the IPv6 port) in a tool like Puppet which works at the 
file-level, they are required to duplicate all the Debian-specific 
options in their config repo as well because they're in the file you 
want to overwrite.  Since Puppet is designed to work with different 
distributions, ideally you only want to include configuration options 
common to all distros - things like pidfile paths should be left to the 
package manager.

My personal opinion is that it would work best splitting lighttpd.conf 
into a couple of files, outside the conf-available directory.

One of these could be named debian.conf (or platform.conf) and contains 
all the log/pidfile paths and other options that should not normally 
change if you're doing things the Debian way, and it would be maintained 
by the package manager so it could potentially be updated if something 
specific to Debian changes.

The rest of the options could go into default.conf which would include 
IPv6 support and be similar to the example config that ships with other 
packages.  It would be nice if some of these options (like index-file, 
which changes rarely) was split out into core.conf, but then of course 
you're back debating what's core and what's user-configurable.

At any rate, lighttpd.conf would then include these files and the 
conf-enabled ones so that people such as myself could simply replace the 
default.conf as needed, and not have to worry about keeping any of the 
platform-specific options up to date.

> Do you have another idea how we could meet both of our point of views:
> yours and ours (note: Lighttpd has no machine readable/writable
> configuration file, e.g. like Postfix)?

I think the debian.conf approach would be a small enough change that it 
could work.  Certainly it would solve my problem.  Hopefully you don't 
find the idea too repulsive :-)

Cheers,
Adam.





More information about the pkg-lighttpd-maintainers mailing list