[sorry for coming back to your post over and over, but I feel many of your
points are still hanging unanswered]
On Wed, 2 Nov 2005, Duane Wessels wrote:
But on the other hand I feel cheated because I remember being scolded
for adding things to the squid-2-head branch when others had decided
that it would become a dead end.
If I remember correctly this accident was a feature added to Squid-2 only
and not Squid-3, and when development on Squid-2 HEAD had already been
abandoned by the others.
If Squid-2.6 gets on the schedule again it's reset with current Squid-2.5
as starting point (in fact Squid-2 HEAD has already been reset to reduce
confusion).
What we previously had in Squid-2 HEAD (aka Squid-2.6 at the time) before
it became Squid-3 is definitely a dead end as it contains a lot of
refactoring and restructuring which now belongs in Squid-3 only.
Like you I suppose, I have a number of little 2.5 features and fixes
that I use on my own squids, which I have been reluctant to commit for
those reasons.
Would be interesting to know what features you use on top of 2.5.
My company has taken on development projects with the understanding
that all future work will go into squid-3. As part of that work
we have promised spend time on making squid-3 stable. We still
intend to do that.
And is the way it should be.
But my experience is that very few customers are willing to wait for
Squid-3 to become stable, instead demanding that the feature is also
developed for Squid-2.5 for production use "now" and in addition also to
Squid-3 to be future safe.
I also see that Squid is quite rapidly loosing it's presence on the market
in favor for our friend Apache for reverse proxies and a number of
commercial closed vendors for Internet proxies, in large due to Squid-2.5
starting to become quite behind in both functionality and performance
unless one is willing to spend a lot of time on patching (a situation not
to far from that of qmail I would say except that we at least have all the
major bugs fixed...)
Before making a final decision on the fate of Squid-2.6 perhaps we should
explore the time frame of Squid-3.0.STABLE a bit. I cannot claim that I
have a good picture of what it may take to get Squid-3 to the point of
Squid-3.0.STABLE, but my gut feeling is that there is a lot more work
remaining than one thinks at the first glance.
Last time I looked at the state of Squid-3 I got a bit scared finding
several major core refactoring and features being left hanging "in the
middle of getting done". The most notable in functionality being range
processing.
The main reason why I promote Squid-2.6 is mainly that we are already way
overdue on getting a new STABLE release and I also do not see a realistic
time frame when Squid-3 may become stable. The initially proposed
Squid-2.6 release can be done within a month making it quite tempting in
order regain interest in Squid, but I do not want to do this at the cost
of significantly delaying Squid-3.0.STABLE, at least not if
Squid-3.0.STABLE can be realistically seen within a not too distant
future.
As you and Alex are currently the only ones actively working on Squid-3
focused development you are probably the best to give a realistic estimate
on the timeframe of Squid-3.0.STABLE.
If Squid-3.0.STABLE is realistic within a not too distant future then
Squid-2.6 is not needed and would in fact hurt Squid in the long run, no
matter how temting the release it may be to myself and others.
If Squid-3.0.STABLE is not realistic in the near future (months, not
years) then the proposed Squid-2.6 in my eyes is highly needed, and would
in the long run probably allow Squid-3.0.STABLE sooner rather than later
even if there is some dissapointment with current sponsors.
Regards
Henrik
