RE: [Phpwiki-talk] Situation update - Setup Diagnostics

[Giovanni M. <Gio...@re...>]

Hi All

> Carsten Klapp wrote:
> 
> > Which one is Joby Walker's config scheme, is that the one with 
> > config-dist.php, config-user.php etc.? I like that system 
> too... (the configurator & old index.php are so huge now and 
> getting tough to maintain.)

Relating to PHPWiki configuration, I'd like to put in a plea for some
setup diagnostics. These would be relatively straightforward to
implement but save days of time if you make errors.

I'm thinking of a "Debug-directories" variable which will print out all
File system and URL paths. I had MAJOR difficulty setting up PHPWiki
1.3.3 on an IIS server (a prior Apache setup was trivial) because I was
confused about whether the directory names should be D:\\home\\xxxx or
D:/home/xxxx and where the paths are partial, whether or not there
should be trailing slashes ... and what the USE_PATH_INFO variable did
or was used for.

Eventually it turned to be that the "USE_PATH_INFO" wouldn't work (on
our IIS setup), setting this to false and it all worked, but it took
days to narrow it down ...

All of this sounds trivial **IF** you know/understand the setup
documentation. I'd set up all the directories (I thought) correctly and
yet it couldn't find the files - but I could see them in the directory I
THOUGHT I'd specified. Obviously it was either looking somewhere else or
the permissions were wrong but finding out which was extremely
difficult.

PHPWiki is now so complex that it's seriously non-trivial to figure out
what's going on.

So how about a switch that:

 1) print out all final paths defined in the Config files
    - especially important if a path has been assembled out 
    of several partial parts

 2) Write test file to each directory that should be writable. 
    This is to validate that the permissions are OK.

Point 2 was a killer recently - I was starting to write an Image
uploader for PHP (yes I know some exist) and the file upload just hung.
It turned out that the PHP upload temp directory wasn't writable but
phpinfo() looked fine, nothing complained, it just hung. As I was
unfamiliar with handling file uploads, it took a while to figure out it
wasn't my scripting/html.

The point of all this is that the simplest of errors can be quite
difficult to diagnose if you're working with incomplete
information/understanding. Some Diagnostics up front can be VERY
helpful.

phpInfo() is invaluable when getting PHP going, how about a "status
dump" for PHPWiki?

What do you think?
Giovanni