Fedora and webserver dependency

[Jan Kaluza]

Hi,

there are over 100 packages which "Require: httpd" and it looks they are 
preconfigured only for httpd. However, Fedora contains more webservers than 
apache (httpd) and it's currently impossible (as far as I know) to install for 
example php (phpMyAdmin, wordpress, ...) if you want to use lighttpd instead 
of httpd, because "yum install php" installs also httpd. You then have to 
disable httpd by "chkconfig httpd off", but there's no way to have PHP installed 
without httpd.

I think one solution is to use "webserver" virtual package instead of 
"Require: httpd". Of course it's OK to use "Require: httpd" in packages which 
really needs httpd and can't work with another webserver, but otherwise I 
think "webserver" virtual package should be used.

Another problem is that each webserver in Fedora uses different username/group. 
If you have application which stores some private data which should be 
accessible for that application and for webserver, but not for another users, 
you have to use something like "chown your_app_username:webserver_group 
private_directory". This is not doable when webserver group is different for 
each webserver, so you have to support *just* one webserver in .spec file or 
loose the security. Can't we use single username/group for all webserver?

Regards,
Jan Kaluza