[Xapian-discuss] Re: quick-and-dirty web search for a bunch

[Olly Betts]

On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 12:19:57PM +0100, James Aylett wrote:
> Perhaps. I'm of the opinion that putting websites in /var/www is
> completely wrong anyway. In what way is the (reasonably permanent)
> HTTP content of your sites /var-like data? :)

This is wandering off-topic, but the argument is that it should be
possible to mount /usr read-only except while actually installing,
updating, or removing packages.  Also /usr is supposed to be sharable
between machines should you want to.

The FHS people seem to agree with you that web sites don't match
the more transient, machine created data in most of /var, so web
content is meant to go under /srv according to the most recent FHS
standard (2.3).

Maybe you don't like /srv any better than /var but this isn't the place
for that argument.  We should follow common installation and packaging
practice and if /srv is adopted we need to support such usage (though
FHS 2.3 is over 2 years old and I've not noticed any /srv directories on
machines I use yet!)

But anyway, the FHS doesn't specify any structure for /srv (it
explicitly says it doesn't) so /srv isn't somewhere that files can
really be installed automatically anyway - so I think we want to
continue installing the omega cgi somewhere appropriate under /usr and
letting people symlink it from where they want to actually use it.

If particular platforms have a standard place for packages to put
cgi binaries, then packages for that platform should use that
location (e.g. debian policy specifies /usr/lib/cgi-bin so that's
where the debian xapian-omega package installs the omega cgi.)
Otherwise the current default of PREFIX/lib/omega/bin/omega is
fairly sane (perhaps PREFIX/lib/omega/cgi-bin/omega would be more
logical though?)

Cheers,
    Olly