On Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 10:33:08AM -0700, Justin Erenkrantz wrote: > I'd *like* to see ./configure --with-port=8080 set Listen 8080 in > httpd.conf. I don't like seeing the default configuration requiring > manual edits. -- justin
That might cause more trouble for administrators than it's worth, and for some subtle reasons. Almost all installations will require some sort of manual intervention, which usually means editing the httpd.conf file. When people come to depend on a build-time configuration script to define some of these parameters, they will be less likely to know how to do it by hand, the end result of which is more users asking for help. I'm not directing this to you in specific, but I think it may do us well to separate the build-time configuration from the run-time configuration. Here's a section from the Autoconf manual titled _Configuring Site Details_: "Some software packages require complex site-specific information. Some examples are host names to use for certain services, company names, and email addresses to contact. Since some configuration scripts generated by Metaconfig ask for such information interactively, people sometimes wonder how to get that information in Autoconf-generated configuration scripts, which aren't interactive." Instead of having a --with-port parameter at build-time, perhaps our default configuration should simply have a "Listen 80" directive. If the server can't bind to port 80, it will be very obvious to the administrator how to fix it, and they won't try to recomple. -aaron
