Options +/-

[Rich Bowen <rb...@rcbowen.com>]

I'm working on a "Lightning Talk" for ApacheCon, which is a bit of a
rant about all the stuff that I hate in the Apache configuration file. I
came across this little nugget of happiness.

Options +Indexes Includes Multiviews
Options Indexes Includes Multiviews

The first of these lines forbids indexing, while the second allows them.
One might call this a bug, or one might say that it's documented to work
that way. It depends on nuances.

The point is that mixing options with +/- options and those without has
unexpected and unintuitive results.

In the context of this mailing list, I've noticed that a number of
distributions ship with configurations that incorrectly use the Options
directive, both by mixing +/- options with those without, as well as the
correct-but-strange "Options -All"

I'd like to request that distributions attempt to rigidly adhere to the
practice of never mixing +/- with non-+/- syntax in the same line, and
using the better (and clearer) "Options None" rather than "Options -All
-Multiviews"

--
Rich Bowen

Re: Options +/-

["Dr. Peter Poeml" <po...@suse.de>]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2005 at 11:04:05AM -0500, Rich Bowen wrote:
> In the context of this mailing list, I've noticed that a number of
> distributions ship with configurations that incorrectly use the Options
> directive, both by mixing +/- options with those without, as well as the
> correct-but-strange "Options -All"

Thank you for the advice.

(I just checked :) but I didn't find such occurences in my packages.)

Regards,
Peter

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