On Fri, Dec 23, 2016 at 2:52 PM, Jim Jagielski <j...@jagunet.com> wrote:
> > As I have also stated, my personal belief is that > 2.4 is finally reaching some traction, and if we > "turn off" development/enhancement of 2.4, we will > stop the uptake of 2.4 in its track. This is where I think we have a disconnect. Our adoption is *broadly* based on the OS distributions from vendors, not from people picking up our sources. Yes - some integrate directly from source, and others use a non-OS distribution. But the vast majority of httpd, nginx, and yes - even IIS users are all running what they were handed from their OS distribution. This is why an amazing number of people run 2.4.3-2.4.10 and soon, 2.4.18, even though these are all already out of date. Once RHEL, Ubuntu LTS, SUSE or others pick up a specific rev, that's where the typical user is going to land for the next several years. The raw stats show a couple of interesting things, IMO; https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_server/all While we have slipped somewhat, the old adage that httpd or another "Web Server" must sit in front of the cobbled-together app servers doesn't apply anymore. Code like Tomcat, etc, is now far more robust and capable of sitting on the outward facing edge of the DMZ. The two runners up in web server space have essentially switched places, nginx now has the market penetration that IIS once enjoyed. IIS now amounts to a fraction of what it once did, essentially the 'everything else' share that used to be held by webservers we don't think about any more, such as Sun's, lighttpd, etc. And of course custom server agents of the top 10 data providers skew the results significantly. Other surveys paint the data a little differently; https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2016/12/21/december- 2016-web-server-survey.html http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/201611/index.html Next up, we will see broad distribution of 2.4.23 - why? Because that shipped in Fedora 25 which will very likely become RHEL 8. E.g. we missed the boat, Generally the Fedora release a year out from RHEL GA become the shipping packages, and the pattern suggests this early winter release becomes an early winter '17 RHEL. If we don't ship improvements, we wither and fall into oblivion. It does not matter that these are called 2.4.26 because *no vendor will ship it*. Not until they start gathering the components of their next major release. Which means, they are shipping are least interesting sources over and over because we aren't shipping new major releases. So I'd respectively suggest that adding a feature to 2.4 vs releasing the feature in 3.0 makes not one iota of difference in goodwill/adoption. The next major releases who code freeze after 3.0 has shipped will be in position to pick up and distribute 3.0. All the rest will be stuck in the past. But as a bottom line, all those users stuck in the past until their OS catches up will have little opinion about a feature in a 2.4.x release they will never see, since their vendor keeps shipping the same 2.4.n that their OS revision had initially shipped. .
