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Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2004 20:47:11 +0200 (CEST)
From: l0rd@xs4all.nl
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Subject: Re: Why is data linked to data-dist 
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LB <l0rd@xs4all.nl> wrote:


> Greetings,
>
> I have a general question that I hope someone can help me with. I was
> wondering why the powers that be have chosen to link /usr/local/www/data
> to /usr/local/www/data-dist instead of just creating
> /usr/local/www/data-dist directly. Can anybody help me with the idea behind
> this ?


This reduces the possibility of people losing their data during an upgrade.


If you portupgrade (or use any other system) to upgrade to a newer version
of Apache, data-dist will be overwritten with the new documentation that
comes with the new version of Apache.  data will not be touched.


As a result, if you left data as a symlink to data-dist, it still works
and shows you the most updated documentation.  However, if relink data
to a different directory, or replace the symlink with a real directory
with your site in it, the upgrade doesn't obliterate your data.