+
+----
+
+I setup ikiwiki on a fedora 10 machine and I am using apache as my http server. Faced a few difficulties while setting it up as the default setup program left some suid files and group writeable directories on the system. It took some time to get it working and documented what I did at http://flyingtux.blogspot.com/2009/03/installing-ikiwiki.html. Thought it might be useful to someone here. (The version installed is 2.72)
+
+> ikiwiki makes wrappers suid by default, because this ensures that when
+> the ikiwiki.cgi is run by your web server, it runs as the user who owns
+> your wiki, and can thus write to it. ikiwiki is designed to run securely
+> suid. If your webserver uses some
+> mechanism to run the ikiwiki.cgi as the user who owns it, without the
+> suid bit being set, you *could* modify `cgi_wrappermode` in your setup
+> file to drop the suid bit.
+>
+> ikiwiki respects the umask, so if your umask is one that causes things to
+> be group writable, they will by. If you want to override that, there is
+> also a `umask ` setting in your setup file. --[[Joey]]
+
+----
+
+/etc/ikiwiki/auto.setup tries to get abs_path of a non-existent
+"repository" path (in ikiwiki-makerepo), and that doesn't work in my perl:
+
+<pre>
+[mort@localhost ~]$ perl -e 'use Cwd q{abs_path}; print abs_path("/var")'
+/var[mort@localhost ~]$ perl -e 'use Cwd q{abs_path}; print abs_path("/abcde")'
+[mort@localhost ~]$
+</pre>
+
+Because of this, /etc/ikiwiki/auto.setup fails:
+
+<pre>
+$ ikiwiki -setup /etc/ikiwiki/auto.setup
+What will the wiki be named? wiki
+What revision control system to use? git
+What wiki user (or openid) will be admin? mort
+
+
+Setting up wiki ...
+internal error finding repository abs_path
+/etc/ikiwiki/auto.setup: failed to set up the repository with ikiwiki-makerepo
+
+usage: ikiwiki [options] source dest
+ ikiwiki --setup configfile
+$ perl -v
+
+This is perl, v5.8.8 built for i386-linux-thread-multi
+(with 2 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)
+
+Copyright 1987-2007, Larry Wall
+
+Perl may be copied only under the terms of either the Artistic License or the
+GNU General Public License, which may be found in the Perl 5 source kit.
+
+Complete documentation for Perl, including FAQ lists, should be found on
+this system using "man perl" or "perldoc perl". If you have access to the
+Internet, point your browser at http://www.perl.org/, the Perl Home Page.
+
+$
+</pre>
+
+Can't ikiwiki's "make test" perhaps test for this, so that one knows something will go wrong?
+-- Ivan Z.
+
+> FWIW, I tried the same thing with perl 5.8.8 from Debian etch, and its
+> Cwd does not have the problem. But I've modified `ikiwiki-makerepo` to
+> avoid using `abs_path` this way anyhow. --[[Joey]]
+
+Thank you! I'm not a Perl programmer, so what's your opinion: is this behavior a violation of the specification of abs_path and I should report it to [ALTLinux](http://bugs.altlinux.org) (the distro)? --Ivan Z.
+
+> That is not entirely clear to me from the documentation. It doesn't
+> say the path has to exist, but doesn't say it cannot either. --[[Joey]]