2015-03-08

Do not edit!

Sometimes I feel things get overworked.

The other day I did a big mistake when upgrading an Ubuntu server running PhpMyAdmin from version12.04 to 14.04. I got the question ‘Do you want to keep the PhpMyAdmin config or replace it with a new config?’. I replied ‘replace with new’, that was almost kissing PhpMyAdmin goodbye.
As I recalled it PhpMyAdmin config was a simple file taking a few minutes to fill in and then just restart apache. But not so anymore, in Ubuntu it seems PhpMyadmin is scattered all over. I found several config.inc.php files and I tried to configure PhpMyAdmin by updating them one at a time but none of these updates worked. Finally I gave up and edited the file /usr/share/phpmyadmin/libraries/config.default.php. You see the header of the config.default.php file above.
I do not see the problem of having one configure file, in fact that is as it’s supposed to be, one simple text file, where you enter simple configure declaratives to adopt the software to your environment and liking. Splitting a simple configuration file into many just makes the configure process harder not simpler. To me it seems someone forgot was configure is about, and went over the top to create the perfect configure process. Often I found less is more.