"The only non-cirtical remark I got when installing eZ Publish was that the environment variable $ENV was not accessible."
This is probably caused by wrong configuration of variables_order in php.ini, it should be:
variables_order = "EGPCS"
"About other things, this will allow me to increase the processing time of the eZ Publish scripts, so the database wil not remain in an an inconsitent state."
eZ Publish uses transactions, so that shouldn't happen. Do you have any inconsistency in your database?
"eZ Publish uses transactions, so that shouldn't happen. Do you have any inconsistency in your database? "
No, I don't. But I was remembering what I have read in the technical manual of version 4.0 about the content class:
"Although it is possible to remove and add attributes using the administration interface, in some cases these operations may corrupt the database. This usually happens when there are too many instances that need to be updated. If the required processing time exceeds the maximum execution time for PHP scripts, the sequence will be interrupted and thus the database will most likely be left in an inconsistent state. At the time of writing, this problem can only be solved by increasing the maximum execution time, which is defined in "php.ini" as "max_execution_time". The default value is 30 seconds, it should be increased to a couple of minutes. A more reliable solution (a PHP script that takes care of adding/removing attributes and run it from within a shell) will probably be added in the future."
On a shared webspace, most of the time, one has no access to php.ini.
