[Mediawiki-l] least upper bound on permissions needed to run texvc for maths support in MediaWiki on Red Hat Enterprise 4/PHP 5

[Jan Theodore Galkowski]

okay.

we're having fun here trying to get texvc to generate PNG files usable
by MediaWiki.

we can get it to run properly from the shell, but it does not generate
anything from within MediaWiki.

pulling out and going into a sandbox PHP file shows the problem is that
doing system, or exec, or popen to the texvc call produces nothing.  we
have checked and increased memory size of the PHP process to 128M.
directories have, for testing purposes, 777 as their permissions, which
will probably be backed down if we can.

PHP is compiled as Apache module, not CGI.  safe mode is off.

there's some installation-specific thing going on, because we have
access to other servers where the test PHP runs just fine.

suggestions?  links?

someone's mentioned proc_open as a way to go.  is that just
superstition?  or is there something special about it with respect to
what MediaWiki wants to do?

thanks much,

 - Jan
-- 
Jan Theodore Galkowski   (o°)                    
 jtgalkowski at alum.mit.edu
 http://tinyurl.com/qty7d