On Nov 20, 2004, at 12:03 AM, Justin Erenkrantz wrote:
I don't believe that Allen would be able to complete his changes in a reasonable timeframe. I'm tired of holding things up for a 'major' rewrite that'll come any day now (TM). Sorry. I'd be willing to give him a week or two to make the changes everywhere he needs to, but even then it'd be hard for all of us to review such a major change.
I'm in favor of releasing httpd 2.1 as 2.2 almost as-is with some relatively minor things thrown in (say the config re-org changes and the group hooks). However, trying to fix the 64-bit issues in a 2.2 (and with an APR 2.0) at this late state would make it really hard for our module writers to adopt 2.2 in a timely manner.
So, my opinion is that we let Allen branch apr off now and let him go at it at a measured pace, but we shouldn't intend to hold httpd 2.2 for that. -- justin
+1. Of course, I am assuming that his 64bit fixes will likely break binary compatibility. For module writers it's not a big deal, but for commercial 3rd party modules it might be. Simply because they would need to produce yet another version of their modules for httpd. Recall how long it took for some 1.3 modules to be ported to 2.0? With 2.2 they will now need to "port" to 2.2, which obviously is trivially easier than going from 1.3->2.0. But there will be delay. If we then produce another 2.x which isn't binary compatible, then it's another process and the module list will start looking quite crowded:
1.3
2.0
2.2 (non-64)
2.x (64)That's a lot of modules for companies to worry about.
No, I don't have the answer but we should be prepared for the uptake of 2.2 to be less than we hope or imagine.
This kind of brings up an idea that's been sloshing around between that handful of neurons in my noggin: Some sort of API "seed" program within httpd/apr where we put a little more effort in getting the latest API versions out there. We've been operating on a "pull me" scenario, and it's worked, but it's been hardly optimal. Maybe some sort of "push" mechanism would be useful. Even if it's just a blurb on the site that Apache 2.2 will be released soon, here is the new API (which is frozen), if you plan to have your Apache modules ready for 2.2 when released, please grab this tarball and test.
In many, many ways the success of httpd depends on the availability of its modules.
