# webapp-config upgrade path?

## whyscream

Hi,

I'm seeing that gentoo devs are slowly moving away from webapp-config (f.i. see awstats). What I'm not seeing, is a clear way to replace the functionality of webapp-config. For instance the means to manage multiple virtual hosts that deploy the same webapp. Forums and mailing lists do not really show any information on how to do this.

Am I missing something, or how is there no longer a "Gentoo way (tm)" to do this?

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## GES

 *whyscream wrote:*   

> Forums and mailing lists do not really show any information on how to do this.

 

This perhaps gives some guidance.

Otherwise, doddle!

What is the specific problem with it?

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## whyscream

I have no specific problem with awstats. However, the latest awstats version bump in portage removed the 'vhosts' USE flag and webapp-config support completely. This has not stopped me into getting awstats back to work again, but my main concern is that the ebuild maintainer decided to drop webapp-config support, in stead of solving the problems with it.

I am mainly concerned about the current state of webapp-config, because:

- It is no longer maintained upstream

- Gentoo webapps heavily depend on it

- In its current state on Gentoo there are some issues with it (mainly lots of outstanding bugs, some of which might not be resolvable without a major overhaul).

- I like the way it works. It does the right thing IMHO, despite its bugs and shortcomings.

- There is no general direction for the package, and while many users depend on it, it is showing first signs of bitrot already.

So my main questions are:

- What is the direction to take? Will webapps continue to exist within Gentoo, or will it be abandoned?

- If continued, who will maintain it?

- If abandoned, how will this be done? Will there be some replacement tool?

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## GES

 *whyscream wrote:*   

> However, the latest awstats version bump in portage removed the 'vhosts' USE flag and webapp-config support completely. This has not stopped me into getting awstats back to work again, but my main concern is that the ebuild maintainer decided to drop webapp-config support, in stead of solving the problems with it.

 

I saw it not.

I do not use it, but I use a lot of other web-app vhost.

 *Quote:*   

> 
> 
> So my main questions are:
> 
> - What is the direction to take? Will webapps continue to exist within Gentoo, or will it be abandoned?
> ...

 

I am also interested in the answer to the questions!

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## 102039

Same problem here. At least a notification about the changed behaviour would be good. I just updated my world and tried the standard webapp-config way of upgrade, which also worked OK, but after that no files were in /cgi-bin or /htdocs/awstats and I was searching forever to find this thread.

Please tell us the current status and plans.

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## robbat2

At the bottom of the ebuild...

    ewarn "This ebuild does no longer use webapp-config to install"

    ewarn "instead you should point your configuration to the stable"

    ewarn "directory tree in the following path:"

    ewarn "    /usr/share/awstats"

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## Flameeyes

While I definitely didn't feel too confident to push this in with a security fix, the situation isn't as critical as people seem to make it. As Robin already pointed out, there's a warning sent out and logged when updating AWstats, and yes, this version doesn't use webapp-config any longer; on the other hand it means that from now on, updating AWstats won't require any further intervention after the merge itself.

The whole reasoning is explained in this blog post of mine from today.

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## whyscream

Hi,

Thanks for the conclusive feedback on awstats, gentoo devs  :Smile: 

Shortly after starting this thread I did some more poking around, and I realised that the move away from webapp-config for awstats was indeed not really a strange choice. I did not state it here because I used awstats merely as a (by now rather bad) excuses for bringing up the situation with webapp-config.

However, I still failed to find some more information about the current state of webapp-config in Gentoo. The blog entry from flameeyes does state that webapp-config is not really suitable for Rails/TurboGears/etc (most of which I have no experience with), but it does work for many of the 'old-school' self-contained PHP applications. Also (as stated before), it is widely in use in many ebuilds and by many users for these PHP apps.

As far as Google could tell me, there has been no recent discussion on this subject. Is there any official point of view in the gentoo-dev community on webapp-config? Maybe robbat2 or flameeyes could tell us a bit more about that?

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## robbat2

It's in the tree, it works. 

It doesn't have an explicit maintainer since March 2010 (look for the mail on the -dev list), so that's why there hasn't been progress on improvements, but there are no proposals to remove it.

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## Flameeyes

Since we have no replacement, there is no intention to get rid of webapp-config in general; but as Robin points out, it lacks a maintainer, as do most of the web applications nowadays, unfortunately.

Given that it's not suitable for the "new generation" of application, it wouldn't be surprising to consider replacing it with something designed from bottom-up to work with those, and I think it would indeed be a good idea to propose for the next Summer of Code, if Gentoo will be taking part to it.

So if somebody is particularly interested in this line of work, and is a student, remember this! I'll try to remember adding this to the list of proposals when we're going to make it.

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