autoinstallers internally depend on vhost/~lockername working

[geofft]

Figure out if we can in the general case make webapps run out of two URLs that differ in the path part that point to the same directory on disk, without depending on /~locker or something of that sort.

Document exactly what /~locker means on vhosts and why it's useful.

See if there are workarounds for some webapps that make using tilde paths unnecessary.

[andersk]

No it doesn’t.

[geofft]

Okay, I should be a little more clear about what I'm seeing. I have a global .htaccess that Redirects /~lockername/ to the vhost, so the internal RewriteRule? to /~lockername/trac-path/trac.fcgi is apparently getting confused by this.

I'm not sure whether I consider this a bug or not. It certainly seems suboptimal for autoinstallers to depend on /~username in the brave new world of *.scripts, mainly because people like me might write those .htaccesses to help convert old URLs. But it's true that it's the only way to get a URL path to a well-known spot in the filesystem.

[geofft]

   scripts / trac / andersk  01:47  (Anders Kaseorg)
       There’s nothing stopping us from redirecting scripts.mit.edu/~locker
       to locker.scripts.mit.edu.  But that doesn’t imply that
       locker.scripts.mit.edu/~locker should stop working.
   scripts / trac / andersk  01:48  (Anders Kaseorg)
       scripts/~locker and locker.scripts/~locker are already being served
       through two _totally_ different mechanisms.
   scripts / trac / geofft  02:14  (apt-get install wnpp)
       I guess what I'm saying is... if I'm setting up my own non-scripts
       server, and I want both trac.example.com/ and example.com/trac/ to
       work, do I need to configure some /_var_www/ magic directory that
       exists on both?
   scripts / trac / andersk  02:15  (Anders Kaseorg)
       Where trac.example.com and example.com/trac refer to the same
       directory in the filesystem?  I think so.  I would love to be proven
       wrong.
   scripts / trac / andersk  02:15  (Anders Kaseorg)
       (You can do it with httpd.conf instead of .htaccess, but that’s not
       the point here.)

So I guess this bug is "figure out if that /_var_www/ claim is wrong, and if so, use that knowledge to make all the autoinstallers much prettier".

A related issue is "document what /~locker does".

[andersk]

Clarifying in the title that this does not have anything to do with scripts.mit.edu/~lockername (which we should kill, #17).