From: "Hal E. Fulton" Date: 2003-07-29T00:24:42+09:00 Subject: Re: install questions ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ben Giddings" To: "ruby-talk ML" Sent: Monday, July 28, 2003 10:02 AM Subject: Re: install questions > I'm not completely sure I understand the question. Are you saying that if > install.rb / raa-install doesn't automatically install the needed > dependencies, that something else would, and if so, what? What I mean is: AFAIK there is no existing mechanism anywhere for automatically installing dependencies. I'm contemplating writing custom code to check whether dependent packages are installed, and if not, invoke raa-install (or something else) explicitly (remembering that raa-install itself may not be there). > Knowing what server is being used: > * Do a 'ps' to find out what services are running and try to match against > common web servers > * Search for typical default install directories / config files > * Ask the user Yes... perhaps one might handle Apache as the most common case, and prompt the user otherwise. (I, for one, don't want to get into the nightmare of how to detect a dozen different server installations.) > As for permissions, if the file is installed as executable in the CGI > directory, it should be up to the user and the CGI writer to ensure that > things are secure. I'm not sure I understand the issue here. Well, part of this is just my sketchy knowledge of web development in general. When I install a CGI by hand, I typically stumble into a number of minor problems and fix them one at a time. For example, when a CGI is writing into a flat file, I find that the file is not writable because of its owner and/or permissions. But I suppose if the user is "nobody" and I just make it rwx for nobody, then the dir can live under cgi-bin and it still won't be insecure, correct? I'm just recalling advice of the form "Don't ever do XYZ" where I don't recall what XYZ was, but it was not intuitively obvious how that made anything insecure. So I'm always paranoid about putting flat files and such under cgi-bin, though that seems to me the natural place to put them. Hal -- Hal Fulton hal9000@hypermetrics.com