Cf http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgSQLiteDataDir

Listing the default in the installer might be good too. :) And we might need/want to expose wgSQLiteDataDirMode or set it more appropriately...

Max, would you mind looking at this?

I know we already expose the directory path in the new installer (the mode setting was useless and removed awhile ago)

As the matter of fact, we're already attempting to make the path absolute, but since we call realpath() before attempting to create the directory, it may fail. Here's my fix for it, I can't currently commit it myself.

Index: SqliteInstaller.php

• SqliteInstaller.php (revision 77580)

+++ SqliteInstaller.php (working copy)
@@ -45,16 +45,30 @@

			$this->getTextBox( 'wgDBname', 'config-db-name', array(), $this->parent->getHelpBox( 'config-sqlite-name-help' ) );
	}

+ /*
+ * Safe wrapper for PHP's realpath() that fails gracefully if it's unable to canonicalize the path.
+ */
+ private static function realpath( $path ) {
+ $result = realpath( $path );
+ if ( !$result ) {
+ return $path;
+ }
+ return $result;
+ }
+

	public function submitConnectForm() {
		$this->setVarsFromRequest( array( 'wgSQLiteDataDir', 'wgDBname' ) );

• $dir = realpath( $this->getVar( 'wgSQLiteDataDir' ) );
• if ( !$dir ) {
• // realpath() sometimes fails, especially on Windows
• $dir = $this->getVar( 'wgSQLiteDataDir' );

+ # Try realpath() if the directory already exists
+ $dir = self::realpath( $this->getVar( 'wgSQLiteDataDir' ) );
+ $result = self::dataDirOKmaybeCreate( $dir, true /* create? */ );
+ if ( $result->isOK() )
+ {
+ # Try expanding again in case we've just created it
+ $dir = self::realpath( $dir );
+ $this->setVar( 'wgSQLiteDataDir', $dir );

		}

• $this->setVar( 'wgSQLiteDataDir', $dir );
• return self::dataDirOKmaybeCreate( $dir, true /* create? */ );

+ return $result;

	}

	private static function dataDirOKmaybeCreate( $dir, $create = false ) {

If the path can't be canonicalized, that sounds...... bad. What sort of failure are you referring to exactly, and why is it failing?

From PHP docs: "realpath() returns FALSE on failure, e.g. if the file does not exist."
I also observed it failing on Windows with paths containing spaces.

We just figured out the not-existing-yet one on IRC. :D I'll take a quick peek at the Windows case.

Meh, committed in r82660.