#4675 (ok 4.4) phpMyAdmin should be able to work without 'examples' DIR

[Christian Wittmer]

phpMyAdmin should be able to work without 'examples' DIR.
'examples' is a folder which should not be 'essential' for the tool to work.

Example:
Warning in ./libraries/relation.lib.php#1820
file_get_contents(./examples/create_tables.sql): failed to open stream: No such file or directory

see attachement for more info

No 'PMA_config' stuff is enabled in config.inc.php and no 'phpmyadmin' database is created from examples/create_tables.sql. I never needed this
Or is it now a must for having 'pma__config' and phpmyadmin DB ???

[Madhura Jayaratne]

Did you install phpMyAdmin from a Linux distribution? Which distribution?
Some distributors prefer to have examples placed in locations like /usr/share/phpmyadmin/ However, this is facilitated by phpMyAdmin with a configuration. Maybe, you distro has not properly set the examples location.

I tend to agree that example folder is not the location for these SQL scripts. I'll start a discussion with the development regarding this.

[Christian Wittmer]

Hi,
yes (openSUSE) and I am the maintainer of the package. This all worked fine until 4.2.x
Since 4.3 I am having these strange warnings and its annoying.
'examples' is located in '/usr/share/doc/packages/phpMyAdmin/examples' ...

Where/How to set 'examples' location ?
What if I do not want to use 'pma_stuff' (create_tables.sql) ?
The only way to get rid of these warnings and being able to use phpMyAdmin is to configure and install this 'pma_stuff'.

Is it a 'must' to use 'pma__stuff' now ???

[Marc Delisle]

Hi Christian,
I believe that OpenSUSE users should be entitled to the benefits given by the phpMyAdmin configuration storage (what you call 'pma_stuff'). To ease its installation, the auto-configuration was implemented in 4.3. As Isaac says below, defining EXAMPLES_DIR should fix these warnings.

[Christian Wittmer]

has the USER a chance to DECIDE if he wants this 'auto-configuration'?
Will the user be asked ?
Or is the User forced to use 'pma_stuff'.

I think the USER should be asked if he want this 'Feature' or 'Improvement'. If the User agrees then your 'auto-configuration' can start but not before.

[Marc Delisle]

If I'm not mistaken, auto-configuration only starts when a user goes to a database's Operation panel, clicks on "The phpMyAdmin configuration storage has been deactivated. Find out why." then clicks on "Create the phpMyAdmin configuration storage in the current database".

[Marc Delisle]

There is also another place where auto-configuration starts. This is controlled by the ZeroConf directive in config.inc.php. However, auto-configuration starts but does not complete due to a bug I just found.

[Marc Delisle]

Incomplete auto-configuration: fixed with https://github.com/phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin/commit/e30d15d3b8cf7978f751aec6d4db3bc0a55e3303 for 4.3.5.

See also https://sourceforge.net/p/phpmyadmin/bugs/4676.

[Isaac Bennetch]

Hi Christian, and thanks for your work bringing phpMyAdmin to openSUSE users.

There's some new functionality to make the "pma_stuff" more automatic, but you've discovered an edge case that wasn't considered when adding this feature.

Note that we already provide a means to move the examples directory with define('EXAMPLES_DIR', './examples/'); in libraries/vendor_config.php; this doesn't help if a user wishes to remove the examples directory completely.

To fix this, we should probably:
1) Make the autoconf portion stop immediately if it can't open the .sql file.
2) Better document what exactly the autoconf will and won't do (see 1584)

[Isaac Bennetch]

If we do move the .sql files, we also should add a directive to libraries/vendor_config.php for the new folder. It may be obvious to whomever is modifying the code anyway.

[Marc Delisle]

Yes, or we could just move these scripts to libraries/sql.

[Madhura Jayaratne]

Fixed with https://github.com/phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin/commit/1b87db57245d9b6748191dbe7fa968b29f0c17dd

SQL scripts no longer resides in examples directory. Also added SQL_DIR configuration in vendor.conf.