apache2 conf.d and sites-enabled oops

[tgpae]

Binary package hint: apache2.2-common

In the latest apache2 default config files, the last lines are

# Include generic snippets of statements
Include /etc/apache2/conf.d/

# Include the virtual host configurations:
Include /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/

Any serious web server has its files under version control. I believe many version control packages add additional files to the directory; at least CVS, RCS, and SCCS do - CVS adds a CVS directory, with a few special files to point back to the repository, and the other two actually store all of the repositories within a subdirectory. The two include lines above will attempt to load all of these revision-control related files as apache config files, which will not work.

I've kludged this for my system with the following, which has me back up and running:

# Include generic snippets of statements
Include /etc/apache2/conf.d/[a-z]*

# Include the virtual host configurations:
Include /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/*-*

This problem is in apache2-common 2.2.8-1ubuntu0.2.
Edit: it was also in apache2-common 2.2.8-1ubuntu0.1.

[tgpae (n-launchpad-net-ubuntu-tgape-org)]

Update: Checking my config history, this was not introduced when I thought it was. I merely hadn't restarted apache after putting everything in version control.

The base principle still applies: one should not have the default configuration preclude revision control. Checking on things further, Subversion (svn) also puts a subdirectory in each managed directory.

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

Thanks for the bug report. This will be considered for intrepid.

chuck

[Stefan Fritsch (sf-sfritsch)]

Most current version control systems (like SVN, git, hg) use files or dirs starting with a dot to store their data. These files are already ignored. The same is true for RCS because the filenames contain a comma. CVS is the only VCS I know that does not use special chars in its file name. We could probably add a special case for CVS.

The exact list of files that are ignored is documented in README.Debian.

[tgpae (n-launchpad-net-ubuntu-tgape-org)]

RCS encourages one to put its files in a directory named RCS - otherwise, they clutter up the original directory with near-matches for every controlled file.

Prefixing the directory with a dot seems like a good plan. Somehow, I doubt the CVS community would be open to that change. I suspect the FSF's apparent decision to reject any change to RCS out of hand on the basis that the concept of people wanting non-collaborative revision control boggles their minds will apply here as well.

Given the contents of README.Debian, it would seem to me that the more appropriate fix, if one were going to be applied, would be to add the exact file names 'CVS' and 'RCS' to the list of excluded files. However, as both of these are admittedly deprecated version control systems, I'm guessing that won't happen either.

[Jean-Michel Vourgère (jmv-deb)]

This is fixed in versio 2.4