[gentoo-user] CONFIG_PROTECT problem

[Peter Campion-Bye]

Hi,
Apologies if I've misunderstood the use of CONFIG_PROTECT, but I think
I've found a hole in it. As I have lots of stuff under
/var/www/localhost/htdocs which contains configuration files mixed in with
the code ( phpmyadmin, phpldapadmin, phpwiki, squirrelmail, gallery etc )
I have put the path /var/www/localhost/htdocs into CONFIG_PROTECT in
make.conf. When one of these packages is upgraded this seems to work fine.
Last night, after upgrading PHP to 4.4.0 my wiki was broken. I thought a
good place to start would be to re-emerge phpwiki, so I did. During the
emerge it flashed up a message about this being a package that it couldn't
upgrade, so it would be unmerged it first. It appears that this bypassed
the CONFIG_PROTECT mechanism, as when the new files were installed the
original had been removed, so no ._cfg0000_ files were created for the
changed files.
Having no recent backup (lesson learned!) I had to recreate the phpwiki
config, which is a non-trivial job.
So the question is, how can config files be protected in this kind of
situation (other than backing them up) - is there another mechanism to
protect files from being overwritten, and how many packages are likely to
do an unmerge before re-emerging, and is there ay way of knowing? I
believe the default behaviour on umnerging a package is to leave its
configuration files in place, this doesn't seem to apply to the web apps.


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