> From: Rich Bowen [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2000 3:40 PM > > I've heard complaints, and had a few difficulties myself, > with regard to httpd.conf. These complaints are on two fronts: > > 1) Although it is great to have such copious comments that any moron can > pick up the file and figure out what they need to change, if you've been > running Apache for a few years, those comments just become a nuisance. > Wouldn't it be nice to have a trimmed-down httpd.conf file that was more > signal, less noise?
This is pretty simple to fix, in an unambigious way. Consider the following section of code: # ## HostnameLookups: Log the names of clients or just their IP addresses # e.g., www.apache.org (on) or 204.62.129.132 (off). # The default is off because it'd be overall better for the net if people # had to knowingly turn this feature on, since enabling it means that # each client request will result in AT LEAST one lookup request to the # nameserver. # HostnameLookups Off Consider a perl parser that simply strips out every line containing a single pound (#), but leaves every line prefixed with two pound symbols (##). This strips the .conf file down to a reasonable size without any headache. This leaves the 'expert' with this: ## HostnameLookups: Log the names of clients or just their IP addresses HostnameLookups Off Much terser, and more attractive for some users. > 2) The organization of the file is somewhat confusing. Directives that > are related do not necessarily appear together, and the directives that > you are most likely to change in a basic installation (ServerName, > ServerAdmin, Port, etc) are buried deep in the file. Perhaps either a > reorganization, or at least a table of contents, would be helpful. Not a bad idea... taking it one step further, now that we support config directories, consider the idea of splitting the server functions into a number of files by topic. Here, a line #>section could direct the following lines into their own file within the conf/httpd.d directory > I raised these points on the docs list, and Ken was quick to point out > that the organization of the file was done after much deliberation by a > number of people who know Apache very well. (I think I used the word > "random", which was a great exaggeration.) Agreed that we aught to look at one bit at a time, and then we could make progress rather quickly. I have no problem if that discussion occurs on the apache-docs list, and those of us who care can subscribe (I just did.) Some will view it as useless noise on new-httpd. > Suggestions that have been made are: To provide a httpd.conf.expert > file, which contains the bare minimum of comments. To provide a > /samples/ subdirectory of conf, containing examples of how one might > accomplish various things. To slightly rearrange the file to move > commonly-changed directives to the top where they are easily > accessible. ---1. The vote is a veto, and the concept is a nightmare. As the one who last brought 1.3.x httpd.conf-dist into sync with httpd.conf-dist-win, we have too many conf files already to maintain. > I've attached a httpd.conf file which is essentially what I use on my > installations, because it removes a lot of the comments that are no > longer helpful to me, and moves some of the directives around so that > the placement makes more sense to me. This would be a good template to decide which .conf lines should retain a single #, and which should be promoted to ##. Rewording is fine. > Comments? Yes... For 2.0 I'm seriously contemplating the <IfDef Win32> ... <IfDef Unix> mechanism to simplify the conf files (Unix, by definition, being any module which is built on the os/unix tree, as opposed to a custom tree.) Let's bring things back together, and use either simple scripts or the apache .conf parser to break them apart for specific users' preferences. Bill
