[Pkg-awstats-devel] Bug#572353: Bug#572353: A Suggestion

[Ken Neighbors]

Sergey B Kirpichev wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 10:53 PM, Ken Neighbors <debian3 at ken.nsds.com> wrote:
>> Here are the specifics of my suggestion:
>>
>> 1. Use the "-configdir" option in Debian-packaged scripts
>> (/usr/share/awstats/tools/buildstatic.sh and update.sh) to instruct
>> awstats.pl to only search one directory, "/etc/awstats".
> 
> This is a good idea.  Probably, an option for /etc/default/awstats &
> debconf question together could give a backward-compatible solution.

Since I wrote that suggestion, I have found and considered some 
additional information that may be helpful in deciding whether or not to 
implement it:

1. The "-configdir" option would only affect the location of 
configuration files when awstats.pl is called from the Debian-packaged 
scripts.  It would NOT affect the location of configuration files when 
awstats.pl is called from the web server (through cgi-bin).  This 
discrepancy may lead to some inconsistent reports or problems that are 
difficult to track down, because the sysadmin may have installed some 
similarly-named config files in the alternate configdir locations (which 
would get accessed from awstats.pl called from the web server, but not 
when called from the Debian scripts).  Therefore, this particular part 
of my suggestion could introduce a problem I had not initially considered.

2. If deciding to implement the rest of my suggestion (or any suggestion 
which involves moving or renaming configuration files), this resource 
may be helpful for automatically renaming a conffile on package-upgrade 
(you might already know about this technique):
   http://wiki.debian.org/DpkgConffileHandling

Ken