Date: Mon, 25 Aug 1997 18:25:20 -0700 (PDT)
From: Alexei Kosut <akosut@nueva.pvt.k12.ca.us>
To: new-httpd@apache.org
Subject: Re: SymLinksIfGroupMatch
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On Mon, 25 Aug 1997, Dean Gaudet wrote:

> FWIW I just ran into a situation where I would find such an option useful. 
> I have a docroot which is writable by a group of people, and they just put
> in a symlink for which the target is the same group ... and now my server
> won't serve the page because I'm only using SymLinksIfOwnerMatch.  So I
> wouldn't mind adding the group feature ;)

On a related issue... I've often thought it would be nice if the
Options directive was extensible by modules. Right now, if a module
wants to set up a per-dir configuration that involves something like a
directory option, they have to create a per-dir config, add in the
directive handler, merger, etc... For modules which don't already have
directives, this is additional hassle and bloat

For example, it has come up that one might want status reports to only
be allowed to be sent by the main server conf, so someone couldn't use
AddHandler in their .htaccess file to send server status. I think this
was solved another way (though I may be wrong), but it seems to me
this might be an interesting way of doing it:

Allow Options to be given arbitrary text strings, which it stores in
an array. It takes care of merging, etc... Then mod_status' handler
can just call rcheckoption("Status"), to see if that option has been
set in the current directory. If not, it won't send the status
report. That way, unless AllowOverrides Options has been enabled, you
can't generate status reports unless the server admin explictly adds
"Options Status" to the directory.

One problem with this is that it would reduce the capacity for Options
to do error checking, unless you set up some way of registering
Options strings.

But I think it's an interesting idea.

-- Alexei Kosut <akosut@nueva.pvt.k12.ca.us>