First post; mod_perl and installation issues

hi,

I've recently had the pleasure of installing the W3C validator software
at work, and it all works great. I got the source from
http://validator.w3.org/source/ - using the hourly tarball link for the
most up to date version of the software.

Our servers can run classic CGIs or mod_perl applications, so I though
I'd make the validator and the linkchecker run OK under mod_perl for
speed - which as far as I can tell I have done with very little effort.
Most of the changes were of the 'use vars... instead of my' variety. I
modified both 'check' and 'checklink'. Once mod_perl has loaded the
code they do run rather speedily.

I also needed to make a few tweaks because our convention is to have
'data' and 'htdocs' files kept in a totally separate place from
'cgi-bin' files. We also needed to give the programs '.pl' suffixes,
and they needed to go in /cgi-perl/validator/... and the HTML docs
needed to be accessible under the url /validator/. That's just the
convention for things here, so I had to fit in with that.

So, my points are:
1) Are you interested in my revised code for mod_perl?
2) if so, should I go one step further and allow the code to really
/take advantage/ of mod_perl if it's used?
3) Could I suggest a few extra configuration variables - e.g. path to
the 'htdocs' folder, URL of the cgi (e.g.
'/cgi-perl/validator/check.pl'), URL of the htdocs (e.g. '/validator/')
- the kind of thing that makes it a bit easier to put the application
in non-default places? Maybe even have a config file, to avoid playing
with the CGI itself?
4) could the packages in checklink actually be implemented as perl
modules (i.e. separate files), rather than being inline packages... or
is there no point? It might be a tad more mod_perl friendly.
5) We wanted to add a custom DTD, and it would be nice (but not
essential) if that automatically appeared in the drop-down menu that
appears on the validation results page.

I searched the mailing list archives for 'mod_perl' and it looks like
the mod_perl issue is already being addressed, but maybe I can save
somebody some work, maybe not.

In case it matters that hourly tarball contained:
check:
# $Id: check,v 1.183 2001/09/14 04:13:13 gerald Exp $
checklink:
# $Id: checklink.pl,v 2.88 2002/01/11 12:36:59 hugo Exp $

P

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Received on Wednesday, 12 June 2002 11:19:50 UTC