From: Pete Yadlowsky <pmy@...>
Date: 2004-09-14T23:37:38+09:00
Subject: mod_ruby and RubyPassEnv


Hi,

We recently ran into a problem caused by mod_ruby's practice of wiping 
the environment clean and building it from scratch. A certain Perl CGI 
script would get served by an Apache process (v1.3.29, mod_ruby 1.1.2, 
AIX4.3) whose environment had previously been scrubbed by mod_ruby. This 
particular Perl script expected to see the timezone variable 'TZ', but, 
uh-oh, it's not there! In this case, we could get around the problem by 
saying:

	RubyPassEnv TZ

but in this diverse operating environment it's quite likely there would 
be similar incidents with other scripts and other missing environment 
variables. So, I modified mod_ruby (ruby_config.c) a bit to accept:

	RubyPassEnv *

which instructs it to pass the existing environment in its entirety; 
i.e. the contents of char **environ. I just thought I'd pass this idea 
along in case someone else finds it useful as well.

There's an entry in mod_ruby's ChangeLog:

2/23/1999:
mod_ruby.c (setup_env): restore environment variables.

which would seem to indicate that, once upon a time, mod_ruby used to 
restore the environment. If I'm reading this correctly, why did it stop 
doing so? Just wondering.


-- 
Pete Yadlowsky
ITC Unix Systems Support
University of Virginia