Question

.I appreciate the testenv file and that the warnings and errors appear in red. I am trying to install TWiki for the first time on Redhat 8.0 Linux machine. How do I properly configure the system to avoid this warning and further problems with RCS.

When I run testenv, I continue to get the following:

"Warning: Since your CGI script is not running as user nobody you need to change the locks in the *,v RCS files of the TWiki distribution from nobody to apache."

By "change the locks," do you mean "permissions"? What does "in the *,v" mean? Were there RCS files that came in the zipped file?

No improvement when I followed the following instructions in documentation:

* HELP The twiki/data/*/*.txt,v RCS repository files in the installation package are locked by user nobody. If your CGI scripts are not running as user nobody, it's not possible to check in files (you'll see that the revision number won't increase after saving a topic). In this case, you need to unlock all repository files (check the RCS man pages) and lock them with a different user, ex www-data, or delete them all - new files will be automatically created the first time each topic is edited. A simple way to change ownership is with a search-and-replace in all files; for example, using perl:

cd twiki/data
perl -pi~ -e 's/nobody:/www-data:/' */*,v

Documentation states "Update notes for the new RCS configuration are marked Dataframework." Nothing appears in documentation for a search of 'Dataframework' except that one statement.

There is additional information about Dateframework, however. I don't understand it.

I also searched "Answered Questions" and read the many entries related to RCS problems.

Summary:

It looks as if there are a multitude of problems with RCS, which discourages the use of TWiki.

• TWiki version: 1.3 (I think, testenv does not show TWiki version)
• Web server: Apache 2
• Server OS: RH Linux 8.0
• Web browser: Mozilla, Galeon, Netscape
• Client OS: same as server

-- JonathanSmith - 24 Nov 2002

Answer

I'm sure somebody can be more helpful, but I've got a few minutes this morning, so I'll make an attempt.

No, the locking is not the file permissions. (File permissions can cause problems for TWiki under Linux (and maybe Windows), but that's not the issue here.)

RCS has it's own method of locking a file by including a line within the ",v" file for a specific file. Don't have one at hand, but if you could view one of the TWiki ".txt,v" files, you would see the line I'm talking about -- IIRC, it's near the top of the file, but I don't think it's the first line.

Anyway, when RCS wants to lock (reserve) a file for someone (as when somebody checks out a file for modification and future check in), it inserts this line in the ",v" file with the name of the user that checked the file out.

When TWiki is "delivered", all of the existing ".txt,v" files are locked by user "nobody". What you need to do is change all of those instances of "nobody" in the ".txt,v" files to the name of the "Apache user" on your machine (the user account that runs Apache (or whatever web server you're running) on your machine). Just to clarify, if "nobody" appears elsewhere in that file, you only want to change the occurrences related to locking, which is why the ":" appears in the perl command above -- there is still a chance that "nobody:" appears elsewhere in the file, and you could garble some data.

That's what the perl line above should do. (I inserted a <br /> above to make the cd and perl line appear as two separate lines which is what is required.)

I'm a little afraid I've garbled some of the explanation of RCS here -- it's not clear in my mind why the files, as delivered, should be locked by anybody, so I've probably got that part a little twisted (maybe someone can clarify), but the essential part is changing that user name to the correct one for your system.

-- RandyKramer - 24 Nov 2002

RCS is usually quite problem-free on Linux, the problems tend to happen on Windows or MacOS but are now solved.

Randy's explanation above is right - the key is to make sure you are in the right directory and then type the Perl command exactly as above.

Dataframework is about a new feature of TWiki, where RCS is built-in. Unfortunately the docs in the TWiki.org TWiki web relate to the new TWikiAlphaRelease, which is not in your version of TWiki. It's best to use the docs that came with your TWiki distribution.

Please read the SupportGuidelines and see if there are any error messages. Downloading the latest testenv from CVSget:bin/testenv, and attaching its output here, is a good idea.

-- RichardDonkin - 25 Nov 2002

For Red Hat 8, httpd by default runs as the apache user (see /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf). You can change the lock ownership within the RCS files (suffixed by ",v") using:

cd twiki/data
perl -pi~ -e 's/nobody:/apache:/' */*,v

Copies of the original files have the suffix ",v~". (If you're paranoid -- like myself -- you can use diff to see what was changed by the 'search and replace'.)

-- AnthonPang - 21 Dec 2002