Item2658: 2 improvments to debian upgrading

I have upgraded my foswiki instalation through debian packages that you maintain. I have two points in that process that seems bad to me: - The postinst script runs a 'chown -R www-data /var/lib/foswiki' that makes my server down... because that directory is a little big. - The admin password was changed in /var/lib/foswiki/data/.htpasswd, even without any confirmation/notice.

I'd like to contribute with you, so if I can help with anything, please let me know.

Thanks!

Kind Regards, Italo.

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sounds like a good thing for me to fix

-- SvenDowideit - 18 Jan 2010

The new packaging in trunk now ships the static content as root-owned files (the _default, _empty, and System webs). Only files that are in the package are upgraded, and no global chown is occuring at package install time. So that should resolve most of the first problem.

Initial install isn't being done yet, but the raw data to do that install is in the foswiki-example-data package. It will be very careful to only do the initial install if there is nothing already present. Since nothing is being done there either at present, the bug on upgrade is basically gone.

The .htpasswd handling is all missing at present, so it's also no longer buggy and won't break on upgrades. When re-implemented, it will be in a separate package like foswiki-apache2, which can be left out on upgrade of existing installs if the configurations are already being managed some other way.

So both are fixed at present for upgrades, but re-implementation for initial installs could break them again. I'll send those re-implementation changes to this task for verification.

trunk .debs are built within about 20 minutes of each checkin and are made available from http://debmarshal.debian.net/foswiki/ Trunk isn't frozen or release-ready yet, so only use them to test upgrades on a clone, not on your real foswiki server. If you have a clone to test on, let me know how well the new trunk .debs upgrade the clone.

It's not planned to backport the new packaging to the 1.0.x branch, so continue to beware in case there is a 1.0.10 release and packages. The new packages aren't done, so there's nothing safe yet to backport, and a 1.0.10 release would likely happen before significant upgrade testing and fixes could occur.

-- DrakeDiedrich - 10 Mar 2010