Paul A. Houle said:

>       The one thing I'd worry about is maintainance.  Suppose there's a
> security flaw in APR...  Well,  Apache is in the front of your mind,  but
> APR isn't,  so it might be easy to overlook the advisory.

A sysadmin would be looking out for more than just httpd advisories -
openssl, php, perl - all of these others need to be monitored by a
sysadmin. Thus the market for OS distros where this monitoring is done by
the vendor for a fee. APR would just join that list (and already has).

>  Upgrading APR
> might be a bit more confusing because the system might spend some time in
> a state where APR is upgraded and Apache isn't -- what effects will that
> have?  (Probably none,  but "probably" isn't a good answer for a
> production server that 30,000 people depend on.)

httpd depends on a minimum version of APR, but you can quite easily
upgrade APR and not have to upgrade httpd. Forward compatibility is
required of any APR release until a new major version is released. APR is
no different to any other library httpd depends on (openssl, etc).

>       If APR is going to be reasonably stable in the future,  then I feel OK
> thinking of it as a system library.  If,  on the other hand,  it's really
> joined-at-the-hip to Apache and lots of app developers are building things
> that need the CVS version of APR,  it had better not be.

APR has been stable for a long time now, and I know of no major projects
that depend on a subversion version of APR.

Regards,
Graham
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