On Tue, 29 Dec 2009, Thomas Krichel wrote:
Requiring an upfront healthy community is particurly problematic is
a small community such as digital library work.
On the other kind, there is widely adopted software that I got
cajoled into maintaining, that consider bad. Apache is one of
them. I run maybe 50 virtual servers an a bunch of boxes, I am still
puzzled how it works and it's trial and error with each software
upgrade, where goes that NameVirtualServer thing into, the constant
croaks "server foo has no virtualserver". I'm not a dunce, but
Apache makes me feel I am one. When I look at these config files
that are half-baked XML, I wonder what weed the guy smoked who
invented this.
If I could do it allover again, I would do it in lighttpd. Oh well
it was not there in 1995 where I started running web servers.
Other problematic case: Mailman. I run about 130 mailing lists, over
80 have a non-standard config, I am running every few months into
problems with onne of them, despite the fact that I wrote a script
to configure all the non-standard lists the same way.
Even if they don't have specific forums, if they're more widely adopted
software, you might have luck with well populated, but more generic
forums:
programming related:
http://stackoverflow.com/
server administration:
http://serverfault.com/
other IT stuff:
http://superuser.com/
I admit that I haven't specifically asked any questions about Apache or
Mailman, though.
-Joe
