[Geoserver-devel] GEOSERVER_DATA_DIR feedback.

I checked out the GeoServer data dir stuff yesterday. Works great, and
definitely a very nice capability.

The one thing I think we should consider is having the dir be a normal
conf/ directory, instead of the data/ and WEB-INF/. This probably begs
a little history on the WEB-INF/

When we started there was a conf/ dir, and it was directly copied to the
war as the data/ dir. The problem with this was that all your
passwords to databases were exposed, in the catalog.xml file, as it
just showed up in the web container. So I think Doug Cates suggested
we put the catalog and services file in the WEB-INF directory. Why?
Because they would then be hidden from users, it was guaranteed not to
be exposed.

But the conf/ directories remained the same, we just moved the two files
in the ant script. But this makes it so you have to put them back in
the right over to 'back up'.

So now that we've got the data dir stuff working, I think we should
resolve the problem, so a conf/ directory (including all the ones in
cite/) is exactly your data dir. We could do this by either specifying
the conf/GEOSERVER_DATA_DIR's all must have the WEB-INF (just change
the current ant script not do the extra copy, so the cite stuff works
right away). Or, we could get rid of the WEB-INF thing. This requires
a bit more work (since we need to be backwards compatible, and support
the case where it _is_ in the war, since we don't want it exposed
there), but is a bit cleaner, since the WEB-INF is a java specific
thing, and doesn't make much sense. But either way, I think we should
align the conf/ directories with DATA_DIR concept.

Also, I've got some fixes for the .bat and .sh scripts (and changed the
.nsi script to use the .bat) that will pick up environmental variables.
All they do is pass them in as java variables to the java call. And I
needed to do one little fix to the GeoserverDataDirectory - to have it
check for an empty string in addition to a null. David, is it ok if I
commit these? I tested on cygwin for linux, windows .bat and windows
installer, and it all seemed to work fine.

best regards,

Chris

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