[Webapps-common-discuss] Several issues

[Stephen Gran]

Hi all,

So I've been hacking on a package I'd like to get working with
webapps-common, partly as a test case for webapps-common, and partly
because I really would like the support in the package.  Good news and
bad news: webapps-common pretty much mostly works already, but it has a
lot of subtle bugs.

One problem I see repeatedly is in the ucf handling.  Currently,
creation of a new virthost ucf creates a new apache config file for the
virthost.  Removing all managed packages does not remove this file (I'm
not sure it should), but neither does purging webapps-common.  
Do these steps:
Install webapps-common using package
Create new vhost instance in webapps-common
purge webapps-common using package
delete apache config file (/etc/apache2/sites-{enabled,available}/vhost)

After purposeful file deletion, we are left with an odd failure mode - 
ucf remembers that the file was deleted and refuses to recreate it when 
you add a new webapp to the virthost that you manually deleted.  This
is probably not the correct behavior, but I'm not sure what the right
logic to fix it is.  Maybe we need a webapps-common-delete-vhost wrapper
script of some sort like the a2ensite and a2dissite scripts?

Another area is the strangely non-repeatable failure modes of some code
paths.  Sometimes, for no apparent reason, nothing will happen with 
dpkg -i package-using-webapps-common
reconfiguring it creates all the apache and webapps-common files, but
dbconfig common asks about reconfiguring the database, rather than
configuring, fails to ask for the mysql root password, and does nothing
silently (this last is presumably a bug in dbconfig-common).

All very odd.  I'm just trying to share my observations of the last day
or two of using it, so that we have some common place to track issues
(since it's not in the archive, we can't use the BTS yet).  Even with
these issues, I think this package is really pretty close to uploadable.
It's also probably arguably better to get more eyes on it with wider
testing, so that we get more coherent bug reports than my 'doh, it
doesn't work' type complaints :)

Thanks,
-- 
 -----------------------------------------------------------------
|   ,''`.                                            Stephen Gran |
|  : :' :                                        sgran at debian.org |
|  `. `'                        Debian user, admin, and developer |
|    `-                                     http://www.debian.org |
 -----------------------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/webapps-common-discuss/attachments/20070908/559b44f3/attachment.pgp