Remove LocalLib.cfg

As far as my experience tells me and confirmed by other on IRC you still need to hack ONE single like in bin/LocalLib.cfg to make a TWiki installation work. It make work also for some developers without but that is likely because you have some shell environment variables defined also.

To my best knowledge an important first step sequence in a new TWiki installation is

• Copy LocalLib.cfg.txt to LocalLib.cfg
• Edit the line $twikiLibPath = "/absolute/path/to/your/lib"; to match your actual lib path

Now that we have configure to take care of nearly anything else it would be natural if this last hacker step could be avoided.

Is there anything that prevents eliminating this file hack?

-- Contributors: KennethLavrsen - 18 Aug 2008

Discussion

So long as configure is used to do what we currently do by hand, I can't see why configure could not try to do it.

But, I think you will find that you're scaring security people more and more - now installers will start with a bin dir that is writeable by apache, and will likely remain so (the fact that configure will install Contribs with cgi's and libs scares me )

I use LocalLib.cfg quite a bit in ways that configure could not autodetect - in the debian package, TWiki.pm is in /usr/lib/perl5_site (or similar) and the LocalSite.cfg is in /etc/twiki :).

-- SvenDowideit - 18 Aug 2008

If TWiki is installed with the default layout and all the CPAN libraries are installed systemwide, LocalLib.cfg is not needed. I have several installations where I didn't hack bin/LocalLib.cfg (TWikiRelease04x01 and TWikiRelease04x02). Actually I don't even have the file: I let the Cwd::abs_path in setlib.cfg do it's magic.

On the other hand, if twiki has a non-standard layout and/or some libraries are not installed systemwide, the LocalSite.cfg is required.

In my previous work with ConfigPanelAddOn (now obsoleted by the configure script), I managed to let the user configure LocalSite.cfg from via the web interface.

We can even put an option in the config panel to "secure" the bin directory.

So it just a matter of someone picking the ball.

-- RafaelAlvarez - 19 Aug 2008

in short, The topic name is wrong - we don't want to remove the cfg file, we want to reduce its importance even further. Users have had a number of addons i tried fail because the LocalLib.cfg was not set, but TWiki core mostly does not care.

-- SvenDowideit - 19 Aug 2008

The topic name came from Crawford's statement that it is not needed anymore.

It is not the presense of the file that is the problem but the fact you have to create it (copy from LocalLib.cfg.txt) and hack it (edit it) as part of a basic installation. If plugins needs it - then it is still correct that our installation docs tell admins to do this step.

But the same one line of information could be given in configure in the first configure screen and the one line - the path to the lib dir - could be written into LocalLib.cfg which would be created if not already there. Just like configure creates LocalSite.cfg.

-- KennethLavrsen - 19 Aug 2008

> installers will start with a bin dir that is writeable by apache

I separate out my installs so that apache doesn't own the bin dir, nor anything outside of data & pub.

All other files are owned by a different user.

When I do it like this, (most often for internet-facing sites), I do use LocalLib.cfg

For intranet-sites I usually don't bother.

-- MartinCleaver - 19 Aug 2008