[pmwiki-users] PmWiki2.0 uploads on VMS

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Fri, Apr 15, 2005 at 05:29:08PM -0700, Brehmer, Daniel wrote:
> I have been hesitating to post because I may be the only one 
> running PmWiki on VMS, although Patrick did mention something 
> about testing on VMS some time ago. Have you pursued that any farther? 

Yes, but haven't gotten very far.  Unfortunately(?) I don't have a
lot of VMS experience to draw on here, nor do I have ready access to
a VMS system for testing.  However, I'm in contact with someone that 
really needs to run PmWiki under VMS, so any help I can get here 
would be, well, very helpful.  :-)

> The problem I am having now is when I put Attach:test.jpg on a 
> page and click on the resulting link I get a blank page. Uploads 
> were working fine under PmWiki0.6. 

Normally receiving a blank page indicates a problem with session
support in PHP -- for some reason PHP simply bombs with a blank page
when it's unable to open a session.  PmWiki 0.6 didn't use sessions
by default, but PmWiki 2.0 defaults to that (because more sites
support sessions than the HTTP authentication protocol).

...and looking at your site, it appears that your version of PHP
doesn't have session support enabled.  So that's the likely 
culprit here.

The workaround will have to be to fix it so PmWiki doesn't try to
open a session when sesson support isn't there, and (probably)
to default to HTTP-Basic authentication for your site.

> In installing PmWiki2.0beta28 I made note of a few things. 
> First, VMS doesn't like directory names with . In them so I had to 
> rename wiki.d and wikilib.d. It doesn't appear that there is a way 
> I can set this in local/config.php either so I edited PmWiki.php. 
> Is there a better way to do that? 

Yes, in local/config.php you can do:

   $WorkDir = new PageStore('wikid/$FullName');
   $WikiLibDirs = array(&$WorkDir, 
                      new PageStore('wikilibd/$FullName'));

which uses "wikid" and "wikilibd" for the directory names.

Ideally, if we can get all of the kinks worked out, I'd like to
have a vms.php recipe that a VMS installation can load to automatically
reconfigure PmWiki to run under VMS.

> Second, it seems that all scripts except version.php have a 
> carriage return after the closing ?>.  This is enough to cause my 
> PHP to throw the "Headers already sent" warning. 

Hmm.  Yes, apparently my editor (vim) is putting a newline at the 
end of each file even though I don't want it there.  Normally PHP
ignores a newline that immediately follows ?>, but apparently that's
not the case in VMS.  (Perhaps because VMS has a different newline
character or sequence?)

I'll see if there's an easy way for me to fix this in vim so that
it won't happen in the future.

> The last funny thing that the new installation is doing is 
> putting out a Ü at the start of the headers. 

I'm not sure exactly what's causing this one.  It doesn't appear to
be in the page template, but it's making it into the $TmplFmt variable,
so it's happening *somewhere* in the code that reads the template or
otherwise configures skins.  I'll have to think about it and/or look
into that one a bit further.

Anyway, let me know if any of the above is helpful.  

Pm