At the very top of the main ikiwiki executable script the PATH environment is set like this:

$ENV{PATH}="/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/opt/local/bin";

This makes it a little hard to specify which specific binaries should be used, especially if there is more than one of them available (see c.f. http://trac.macports.org/ticket/26333 where the MacPorts-supplied, up-to-date subversion should be used and not an arcane one from the base distro / OS). Is there a specific reason why ikiwiki wipes out $PATH like this or could that line be improved to

$ENV{PATH}="$ENV{PATH}:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/opt/local/bin";

? The alternative is of course to patch ikiwiki as suggested in the bug, but I wanted to ask here first

You can use the ENV setting in your setup file to set any environment variables you like. Since ikiwiki.cgi is run by the web browser, that is the best way to ensure ikiwiki always runs with a given variable set.

As a suid program, the ikiwiki wrappers have to sanitize the environment. The ikiwiki script's own sanitization of PATH was done to make perl taint checking happy, but as taint checking is disabled anyway, I have removed that. done --Joey

Question: Do ikiwiki.cgi and the RCS post-commit script sanitize the $PATH separately from bin/ikiwiki? If not, then bin/ikiwiki is probably right to sanitize the $PATH; otherwise you've created a security hole with access to the account that ikiwiki is SUID to. It'd be nice if /opt/local/bin were earlier in the $PATH, but that can be changed (as noted) in the setup file. Glenn (Also the person who started this by filing an issue with MacPorts; I'm experimenting with ikiwiki for collaborative documentation.)

The suid wrappers remove all environment variables except for a few used for CGI. PATH is not propigated by them, so when they run ikiwiki it will get the system's default path now. --Joey