(applicable to SVN trunk and AFAIK 1.3.0_b3, I haven't checked any older
versions)
First, the facts:
1) In INSTALL, we see:
Apache must be able to read and write /path/to/ledgersmb13/templates/
-------------------------------------------------
Make sure the /path/to/ledgersmb13/templates directory is read-writable by
user:group apache:apache, or as appropriate for your distribution's Apache
conventions.
Apache must also be able to read (but not write) /path/to/ledgersmb13/ and its
subdirectories.
2) Then in INSTALL.manual, we see:
Apache must be able to read and write to the templates/ directory
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Make sure the templates directory is read-writable by
user:group apache:apache, or as appropriate for your distribution's Apache
conventions.
Apache must also be able to read (but not write) ledgersmb13/ and its
subdirectories.
3) But in install.sh, we have instead:
chown $username spool templates css
4) Meanwhile in doc/README, we see:
SET PERMISSION:
---------------
change directory to /usr/local/ledger-smb
# chown -hR nobody:nogroup templates css spool
replace nobody:nogroup with the web server user and group.
Some systems use apache:apache, www, www-data, ...
Then, the questions & my conclusions:
1) templates needs to be writable by the web server, that's consistent.
2) do css/ and spool/ need to be writable or not? Writing to spool/
makes sense, writing to css/ isn't quite so obvious. I haven't found
any instances of code needing to write to css/ yet.
3) for readability, I'd recommend replacing the INSTALL.manual text with
the text found in INSTALL.
4) since the SVN tree and tarballs both create a directory called
"ledger-smb", I think either the directory name should be changed in the
tree, or the references to "ledgersmb13" in the two INSTALL* files
should be changed. As-is, the references are ambiguous since there's no
directory actually called "ledgersmb13" as far as I can tell.
5) I don't have any clue whether the files under templates/ should be
writable by apache (or nobody, or whatever) even if the directory is;
the script only makes the directory writable whereas the command in the
README file makes all the files in the directory writable as well. The
INSTALL* files don't cover this explicitly.