Item14530: Add new config "RootDir" to unify configuartions of file system paths

I was very surprised to see all 7 system dirs (ScriptDir, TemplateDir, WorkingDir, ToolsDir, PubDir, LocalesDir, DataDir) are configured separately while normally they are all in the same root dir of the site. Then I reconsidered the rationale, and thought that there may be some situation (can anyone give one) that they need to be placed elsewhere out of the website's root dir. So I propose a new config parameter "RootDir" to have all other dirs set relative to this RootDir. Their relativity is only set up at bootstrap config, and the admin can later freely change them to whatever he/she wants.

So the default settings should be: XxxDir = $Foswiki::cfg{RootDir}/xxx, and RootDir is auto-detected (at bootstrap) to be the root dir of the website.

-- WillLe - 17 Nov 2017

I've submitted a pull request https://github.com/foswiki/distro/pull/18

-- WillLe - 17 Nov 2017

Hi, Thanks for the patch. We'll have to ponder this a bit. I believe that there were at one point some deployments that wanted certain directories outside of the normal root directory - cgi-bin and lib if I recall. lib being the most difficult to relocate, as we use lib to find all the other directories.

-- GeorgeClark - 21 Nov 2017

I merged your pull request into the Item14530 "Feature" branch based off of master, so that I could more easily do some testing.

You pointed out in the pull request:

On page configure > General settings > File system paths, the subdirs are sill shown in absolute path with a button "Reset to default value $Foswiki::cfg{RootDir}/xxx", but the actually values to be saved are in form "$Foswiki::cfg{RootDir}/xxx". To show the correct form on config page, the Query.pm/getspec() should be modified a little bit.

The issue here is that Configure/Bootstrap.pm sets the expanded paths during bootstrap in the processing of validating the paths by checking for critical files in each directory. That whole section of code would need an overhaul to work with the reference to the RootDir. Never mind. Indeed it's something in Query.pm that needs fixing.

There is still something not quite right. The definitions in Foswiki.spec need to be uncommented. They are actually no longer bootstrapped. Only the RootDir is bootstrapped. I'll putter with this a bit more when I get some time.

-- GeorgeClark - 21 Nov 2017

I've submitted a pull request: https://github.com/foswiki/distro/pull/19 to correct the values displayed on the bin/configure page.

-- WillLe - 26 Nov 2017

Merged into master.

-- GeorgeClark - 10 Mar 2018

Commenting is disabled while not logged in