Package: moodle Version: 1.4.4.dfsg.1-3 Severity: normal
The working of Moodle's wwwroot configuration variable is causing us problems. I may be missing something, but even if I am, the default way of doing things seems unnecessarily awkward. The apparent intention is for wwroot to be set to a full base URL: $CFG->wwwroot = 'http://oursite.com/path/to/moodle/'; This base URL is then used for both internal links, i.e. from one location in the Moodle-managed site to another, and in emails and other other external references--e.g. "click on this link to see your new message." However, having full URLs in internal links breaks two usage models that we need in different situations: i. The host may be known under different names or IP addresses to different clients. That's a hard problem when it comes to emails and other external references, but at least it shouldn't break the internal links. ii. In some cases it may be desirable to use https instead of http. With internal links specifying the protocol as well as the hostname, https access becomes impossible without either falling back to http, or forcing https use for everyone. In reality it may be just the admin who needs to use https, and the certificate may be self-signed. In that case it wouldn't be reasonable at all to force all users into https. These problems can be worked around by setting wwwroot to an absolute path instead of a full URL, e.g: $CFG->wwwroot = '/path/to/moodle/'; This works fine, except that the external references are now merely paths, not complete URLs! So people get emails saying "click on this link: /path/to/moodle/" which of course doesn't work. A solution I hope could be relatively painless would be to split wwwroot into the http://oursite.com/ and /path/to/moodle/ parts internally on startup, keeping only the latter part in wwwroot but prepending the first part in all cases that generate external references. I'm assuming those are less common than the internal-reference cases in the code. -- System Information: Debian Release: 3.1 APT prefers unstable APT policy: (50, 'unstable') Architecture: i386 (i686) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Kernel: Linux 2.6.11 Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Versions of packages moodle depends on: ii apache2-mpm-prefork [httpd] 2.0.54-5 traditional model for Apache2 ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.4.50 Debian configuration management sy ii mimetex 1.50-1 LaTeX math expressions to anti-ali ii php4 4:4.3.10-16 server-side, HTML-embedded scripti ii php4-gd 4:4.3.10-16 GD module for php4 ii php4-mysql 4:4.3.10-16 MySQL module for php4 ii php4-pgsql 3:4.3.10-4 PostgreSQL module for php4 ii wget 1.9.1-12 retrieves files from the web ii wwwconfig-common 0.0.43 Debian web auto configuration -- debconf information excluded -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]