Please make default configuration consistent and flexible

Binary package hint: drupal

I find the following default configuration items of drupal-5.1 in Feisty needing improvement:

- In /etc/drupal/5.1/htaccess the directive "RewriteBase /drupal" is commented, this makes "Clean URLs" not work in the default configuration since the default location is http://whatever/drupal ...

- /etc/drupal/5.1/apache.conf is symlinked into /etc/apache2/conf.d/ . Since conf.d applies to the base server configuration this has the effect of having drupal Alias:ed into all your VHosts, which you might not want. I suggest that the Alias-part is placed in an appropriate VHost configuration in /etc/apache2/sites-available/ instead.

- Since the htaccess isn't dynamically updated by drupal there's no reason for it not to be included in the server configuration directly. There are obvious gains in performance by not having to check and parse the htaccess for every access. I suggest that the htaccess stuff is moved into the apache2 config since that's the only webserver the package supports anyway. Also having a single htaccess will cause problems if you want to have different drupal sites in different locations since the RewriteBase directive is common to all VHosts.

- And then there's the usual "can't configure database access without password" issue. Postgresql has supported reliable identification by using a Unix Domain Socket for quite some time now, this is the default access method when the database server is on the local host. The dbconfig-thingie seems to generate a database with a password and it looked like it was using localhost instead of the default access method, which might be explained by drupal being stupid and not allowing you to specify an empty host/password. I poked the drupal developers regarding it on http://drupal.org/node/125105 (probably the wrong place, but I was rather annoyed at that point). I'm not expecting this last item to be solved, but I want to raise the issue in the hopes of having all stupid web applications that gets this wrong fixed eventually.