Regression in old settings files

[Robie Basak]

I had a settings file that did not set PATH. On upgrade to Trusty (3.2.1-1 -> 3.3-1), I started seeing the following:

WARNING: Could not process theme/templates/base.html
'NoneType' object has no attribute 'lower'
ERROR: Skipping theme/templates/article.html: could not find information about 'title'
Done: Processed 5 articles and 0 pages in 0.45 seconds.

I'm not completely sure if this is a regression or not, or if the previous behaviour worked but was silent about these problems.

The solution seems to be to add:

PATH = "content"

to my settings files. Otherwise it seems to default to "." or something.

Research pointed me to https://github.com/getpelican/pelican/issues/1116 and https://github.com/getpelican/pelican/commit/fb994b1399bc2ca15e6cb046dbbacefb9fd31aca, but it looks to me that this affects only new settings files created with pelican-quickstart.

Did the behaviour change, or is this a mistake I had made previously? Whichever way, an upgrade to Trusty appears to bring this out.

I'm not confident enough to suggest any changes to Ubuntu right now. Leaving this here in the hope that it is useful to others.