Re: Re: potential public web solution

Hi Dave, That is good and will work for packages that don't use the <replace /> option with local configuration things like the data directory. For instance, although this is a bad example because phpDocumentor is only useful locally, it uses several configuration variables, and replaces them on install, so if you install phpDocumentor locally, and upload it to a remote server, it won't work at all, because all the paths will be as they were on the local computer. Incidentally, users don't need shell access to use the web installer, and it can be protected with .htaccess for security just like any other webpage. Regards, Greg Dave Mertens wrote:

that's quite an administrative nightmare, isn't it? I have a web server with ~50 sites, do you want me have 50 parallel PEAR installations?

As it stands right now, none of them can use packages like HTML_TreeMenu through PEAR, they have to simply unzip the thing directly. The point would be that each user can independently use the pear installer on their local site, and maintain that installation themselves, the way they maintain the source code they upload themselves.

First of all, what's the reason your customers have shell access in the first place. Just sftp/ftp should be enough i think. I also host some websites for some collegues, but i have a rather different approch: users can ask me to install a pear package, but aside from the global pear library in /usr/local/lib in also provided a include path to a scripts directory below htdocs. pear packages installed their will work perfectly. So, the basic packages are installed global, but users are allowed to upload the our packages. They only have to follow the pear tree structure to get things right. So when they do a ' include_once( "Mail/mime.php" ); ', a lookup is done in the user library (/wwwroot/sitename/scripts (website ifseld hangs under /wwwroot/sitename/htdocs)) and after that the global library is searched. This allows users to have an later version than is installed default on the system.. I hope i gave you another view of how things can be done ;-) With best regards, Dave Mertens