Re: [privoxy-devel] 3.0.8 fails to autostart on reboot of OS X 10.5.2

[Mr. J. B. <uu...@ro...>]

Replying to my own message here. I've done some more looking-into into this.
It looks like the installer is seriously broken and fails to properly account for a 
system that already has a previous version of privoxy installed.

Rather than installing into /Library/Privoxy as all previous versions, this one
puts the executables into /usr/local/etc/privoxy   

It also attempts to put the auto-start files into /Library/StartupItems/Privoxy.
Unfortunately, this seems to fail. So what is left in there the StartupItems directory 
are the old startup items from an earlier version of privoxy. 

The uninstaller fails to uninstall anything from /Library . I had hoped that simply 
uninstalling and then reinstalling would clear out the old stuff and make way
for the new, but unfortunately that was not the case. An "uninstall" leaves a lot of 
stuff installed; enough to prevent a new install.

The config and log situation is equally bad and adding to the problems. The new installer
appears to attempt to preserve old config files. Unfortunately, they are not compatible.
The major problem is that formerly the default.actions file was specified in the config
file as "default". The installer preserves this file in order that 3.0.8 can crap out when
it cannot find "default" when instead it should be "default.action". I'm not sure what 
sort of braindamage lead to this situation, but the end result is that no one who has
an existing earlier version of the config file will be able to use privoxy without editing
it. The system will (almost) silently fail.

The logging configuration is a mess too. Logs are kept in TWO SEPARATE PLACES! For some
reason, there is one log in /var/log/Privoxy. This seems to be where Privoxy Utility keeps
its output. Then there is the location specified in the config. One major problem seems to
be that when you use Privoxy Utility to specify a log file location, it creates the directory
with owner/group root/wheel and 660 permissions. But when Privoxy starts up, it tries to 
create files within that directory and it can't because it is running as user _privoxy.
The result is that the process (almost) silently fails. The (almost) is because it does write
a log entry into /var/log/Privoxy but there is NO indication that output will be going there
and it's just a matter of luck that a user might find it.


I'm guessing that this release was put together by someone with a lot of linux experience
but no knowledge whatsoever about how the mac works. So THANK YOU very much for
the work. However, what we've got here is a release that will disable privoxy on all existing
installations and require substatial sysadmin sleuthing on the part of anyone who wants to
get it running again. In the real world, these are showstopper bugs and should stop further
distribution until they're resolved.


Recommendation: I think the simplest approach would be to make the uninstaller available
in the Privoxy Utility actually uninstall both the current and any legacy versions of privoxy;
just totally wipe /Library/Privoxy and /Library/StartupItems/*privoxy*
If this is judged too heavy-handed, then move the files rather than erasing them. 
The uninstaller also needs to blow away the config file, wherever it is.








--- "Mr. Joe Bangles" <uu...@ro...> wrote:

> 
> I have recently updated my Privoxy installation from a 2.n release that was working fine.
> 
> I downloaded the 3.0.8-2 release from sourceforge and installed. I ran StartPrivoxy.command
> and it began running and working well.
> 
> On system reboot, the privoxy process did not restart. I believe that it is expected that a
> simple package installation will result in an auto-starting privoxy process, yes?
> 
> Here are the contents of the privoxy startup directories:
> 
>   /Library/StartupItems/Privoxy:
>   drwxr-xr-x  5 root  wheel  170 Apr 28 13:52 .
>   drwxr-xr-x  3 root  wheel  102 Feb 16 06:27 ..
>   -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  894 Nov  2 19:23 Privoxy
>   -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel   17 Jun 16  2007 Privoxy.loc
>   -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  243 Oct 28  2007 StartupParameters.plist
> 
> Is it possible there's legacy crap laying around and causing the new
> install to do something wrong? I tried using the new Privoxy Utility
> to uninstall Privoxy, then redownloaded and reinstalled and there are
> still files from October of last year in there.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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