The 'other' not-so-dedicated-but-certainly-interested developers felt 'shut out' of the 2.0 development cycle
because it was obvious a lot of it was taking place
'off line' and nothing was being documented so they
couldn't really get a good handle on what was going
on in order to make a contribution.
So they were mostly 'waiting in the wings' for a lot of
the 2.0 DESIGN level decisions and concepts to become clear so they could 'jump in'.
When I reworked mod_proxy for v2.0, it was one of the first modules to jump in and fully utilise the filter mechanism. Admittedly it took a while to get my head around the filter stuff, but once I had got it, it was fine. All the v2.0 mod_proxy development happened over weekends, and not on company time (a lot of it in a hotel room in Alsjo in Stockholm, but anyway).
I feel the architecture jump from v1.3 to v2.0 was worth the effort, as the previous "one handler at a time" nonsense went out the window, replaced with a possiblity of "choose from these filters, and interchange them at will in new and interesting ways". The split of mod_proxy into mod_proxy and mod_cache would not have been possible without filters.
I think the key thing is this: Apache v2.0 works, and better fulfils the requirements of people doing web hosting. Less development means there are less itches, and less itches means Apache v2.0 is a closer fit to user requirements than v1.3 was.
Regards, Graham --
