Unix Installer Perceived Issues

Note: perceived issues - neither cygwin nor hosting site installs were considered for this installer! Still logging them for obvious reasons

id	Issue	Environment	Comment	Status	Reference	Resolved ?
Pi1	using (ctrl-z) to drop to the shell and poke around makes you lose the question and setting, so get all your info ahead of time	Cygwin	-	3	MW	.
Pi7	configurator pukes if TWIKISTEM =="/"	Cygwin	That sucks bigtime.	2	MW	.
Pi8	using & in options breaks things	Cygwin	Don't do that. (causes headaches for shell scripts which is why you get problems I'll look into it)	5	MW	.
Pi10	Script requires root	Cygwin, Hosting	Currently it does, it could be made potentially non-root, but needs thinking about.	3	MW, MC	.

| Pi11 | /etc/twiki limiting installs| Cygwin Hosting | /etc/twiki does indeed limit installs to just one running instance. I have no plans of changing this at this time, but ~/etc/twiki might fly | 4 | MC | . |

Pi12	Support installation of plugins	Linux	Note to self. Ask for a global "plugin zips directory", and unpack	2	-	.
Pi13	Support data and code tangling	Linux	Someone might decide they want to migrate back to a standard TWiki layout	3	-	.
Pi2	Logfile would be nice	Cygwin	Good point! (to say the least)	Done	MW	Y
Pi3	moving a script being run not liked by cygwin (distributify.sh,23)	Cygwin	Can probably do this a different way	Done	MW	Y
Pi5	auto restart of apache	Cygwin	Now being done correctly under cygwin	Done	MW	Yes
Pi6	"rm: cannot remove `23:30': No such file or directory"	Cygwin	I half expected this - this is due to parsing "ls -l" output rather than anything else. Really should be made into perl anyway	Done	MW	Probably
Pi9	syntax error near unexpected token `fi'	Cygwin	I don't get that error, so I suspect it's a shell issue of cygwin - the fi correctly closes the if near the top.	Rejected	MW	Y
Pi14	Headless installs would be useful	Any	Definitely	Basic	-	Basic
Pi15	Clearing of Screen causes problems in backtracking	Any	Agreed - this should be removed	Resolved	MW	Y
Pi4	chown barfs ("invalid user")	Cygwin	Largely ignored by cygwin AFAICT, cosmetic problem only under cygwin	cosmetic	MW	.
Pi16	Current Installer (v1.7) Broken	Cygwin	Resolved	Done	.	Yes
Pi17	Twiki Beta at http://twiki.org/release/ is available only as .zip installer asks for tar.gz			1	.	.

-- MS - 01 Jul 2003

Unix Installer Resolved Issues

id	Issue	Environment	Comment	Status
Pi2	Logfile would be nice	Cygwin	Done	Resolved
Pi3	moving a script being run not liked by cygwin (distributify.sh,23)	Cygwin	I now copy the script before distributifying	Done
Pi6	"rm: cannot remove `23:30': No such file or directory"	Cygwin	I no longer parse ls output but check file attributes - which should resolve this	Probably Solved
Pi9	syntax error near unexpected token `fi'	Cygwin	Was caused by mis-edit by user of script	Resolved
Pi14	Headless installs would be useful	Any	Basic implementation in place (bootstrap.sh -headless)	Basic Solution in place
Pi15	Clearing of Screen causes problems in backtracking	Any	Removed	Done
Pi5	auto restart of apache	Cygwin	Now being done correctly under cygwin	Done
Pi16	Current Installer (v1.7) Broken	Cygwin	Lots of cygwin fixes put in place	Done

-- MattWilkie - 18 Jul 2003 -- MS - 18 Jul 2003

Resolutions needing some extra work

Pi14 has a basic implementation of headless installs. This allows me to do quick smoke testing of the installer. Ideally however you should be able to provide an argument in the form of a filename - which would be a twiki.system-config file. (Which would allow headless customised installs)

Cygwin Notes

Against my better judgement I've been installing cygwin on a machine. (glutton for punishment?) Cygwin appears to loathe me and won't give me a "|" no matter how much I ask, but I have found what I think is the cause of Pi16. All the reports I was given for restarting apache under cygwin pointed at a single command apachectl rather than a full command line - /usr/sbin/apachectl. As a root user under unix doing the former of these two would reuslt in the latter being called (or somewhere else in the path). However under cygwin (or at least for me) this doesn't work. This would break the installer due to the way I deal with restarting apache. I'll now be able to resolve this.

I tried the installer on Windows XP yesterday and had no end of troubles. All seeming to resolve around file and directory permissions. Turns out I (my username) have permission to create and modify files in the cygwin tree but not delete even though I am a member of Administrators group. Strange.

And a refinement on my earlier reports: I'm not using the Apache, which is v1.3x, that installs via cygwin setup.exe. I installed Apache2 from tarball. The Windows XP test machine is using the stock cygwin-apache. Clear as mud?

-- MattWilkie - 23 Jul 2003

Chown "issue"

Not an issue due to the way cygwin works AFAICT. (Occurs because the system normally greps for User & Group from httpd.conf - both of which are commented out in the Cygwin configuration - because they're pretty much ignored by cygwin (AFAICT). I might resolve this to get rid of the warning at some point.

• The cause of this problem is that Apache2 introduces a UserDir directive. So the grep search returns two matches which get concatenated into a (probably) invalid user for the later chown operation. The fix is grep for '^User ' instead. My cygwin-patch on TWikiUnixInstaller implements this fix. Not in the patch but probably a good idea is to change the group search to '^Group ' as well. This issue is not specific to cygwin. -- MattWilkie - 22 Jul 2003

• The best solution for a stock cygwin installation in which User and Group are commented out is probably to just skip the chown commands. e.g. if $User is null, jump to next routine. -- MattWilkie - 23 Jul 2003

-- MS - 19 Jul 2003

losing the history files

I understand how removing the *.txt,v files simplifies (a lot) the whole installation business. I think having the option of keeping them will increase the installer's acceptance level though. What do you make of RcsNonStrictLocking?

-- MattWilkie - 23 Jul 2003

Rather than non-strict locking, which seems to have had some problems, why not just re-lock the files on installation? This is just one line of Perl code for all files, and can be launched from a shell script - WindowsInstallCookbook has the relevant Perl command. I'm not sure why avoiding this is a huge simplification, as long as you know the userid under which Apache runs - this is already reported by testenv and can then be typed in by the user. Of course, it is easier just to delete the history...

-- RichardDonkin - 24 Jul 2003

Michael has already answered this question. See RelockingRCSFiles

-- MartinCleaver - 24 Jul 2003

> Of course, it is easier just to delete the history...

And thus Richard answers his own question (Sorry, couldn't resist )

More seriously you don't know the userid of apache from testenv unless you've installed testenv (default apache 1.3 install in cygwin from cygwin installer doesn't set a User). testenv shouldn't be installed without the rest of twiki really since it can't do all it's tests. If TWiki is installed then RCS should be working. For RCS to work the histories need to match the userid. To match the userid without parsing a process tree (try doing that portably - even different unices do it/display it differently) you need testenv. Oh hold on. There's a hole in my bucket.

So you step back. It's a new installation. Therefore, it has no history. (Except in the landWeb it was colonisedcloned from) Therefore they get deleted. They shouldn't (IMO) be in the main distribution. As should neither pages for TWikiContributors - it confuses the life out of new people, and in every installation I do I have to change the pages to say "NO LOGIN ON THIS SYSTEM" to make it clear to people. (Or delete them - but that breaks links) But that's a separate issue. (Which hits GPL issues of course)

• I move the pages for Main.PeterThoeny and friends to the TWiki web, and add a TWiki:Main/PeterThoeny link. This should be the as distributed setup in my opinion. -- MattWilkie - 24 Jul 2003
• If you just need the userid, it would be easy to do a massively cut-down testenv, e.g. getuser, that just returns this value. Or perhaps it would be better to see if there's a Perl module to portably get a list of processes on any Unix - this may well exist, and could be bundled with the installer. Alternatively, just have a second-phase installer script that re-locks the RCS files once the main TWiki setup is installed. [ RichardDonkin 24 Jul 2003 ]
  • Or I can just take the stance that it's a new system, with no history and old revisions have no place being there... shrug -- MS - 24 Jul 2003

-- MS - 24 Jul 2003

Just read: AnotherInsecureDirectory - this is the problem affecting windows users. Why can't windows/cygwin implement a proper security model and just do the right thing? (I've replicated Matt's ln -s issues and they happen even if you're running as the Administrator. )

I'll wait until I hear of a solution to these problems before making any further changes to the installer - the installer is doing 100% the right thing for it's designed OS - the problem is cygwin doesn't implement unix permissions or windows isn't letting it, or some combination thereof. Which in my eyes makes it a cygwin/Windows bug, not an installer bug.

I suspect someone else who needs this working needs to report these sorts of issues to cygwin to get them correctly resolved. They might even have a FAQ, who knows?

-- MS - 24 Jul 2003

Windows Installer Perceived Issues

Doesn't exist. Bit of an issue.

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Fixed the spelling of 'perceived' [ RichardDonkin 23 Jul 2003 ]
This is a known issue ( )