Description of Problem: When upgrading apache, a new index.html file is installed if none exists. This can break a production site because index.html takes precedence over index.php, index.php3, index.php4, index.cgi, etc. The result is that an upgrade will effectively bring down a site's home page, replacing it with an idiotic "welcome" page and possibly getting yelled at by one's boss. Upgrading a 7.2 machine to 1.3.22-2 will cause this. Is it possible to _not_ install index.html if upgrading an existing installation, and index.html doesn't exist? This can only happen if the user intentionally deleted the original index.html, so it's clearly incorrect to put one back.
This can be worked around by putting a redirect directive to your index.php or what have you in a blank index.html file. The other thing you could do is reorder the list of default web pages so that index.html is last. There's nothing that can really be done on an upgrade only.
This update also effectively locked out several of our web page editors... our /var/www/html directory had permissions 2775 with a group set on it for people who could edit web pages. The update reset those to 755 root:root. On top of that, we use an index.cgi, so we wound up with the default apache start page in place of our usual home page.
*** Bug 67181 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
We're going to solve this by removing /var/www/html/index.html from the package (at least, renaming it out /var/www/html), and having this "Test page" set up as an ErrorDocument for "/", so it is only displayed if no other index page can be served. Could you file the /var/www/html permissions problem as a separate bug?
done. bug 67565
Thanks. The Apache 2.0 package (named "httpd") now available in the Limbo beta implements the scheme I gave in the comment above, hopefully a satisfactory solution to this problem.
*** Bug 68492 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
FYI, the apache-1.3.27-3.7.2 update did this AGAIN (created index.html because it didn't exist, which took down a production site which used an index.cgi). This is not fixed.
This is fixed in RHL8 and above; it wasn't feasible to fix it for the 7.x errata.