A month or so ago Doug and I were talking about the functions he needed from the core to implement the perl config funkiness. I think we agreed that if we could change the configuration code to read from a callback instead of just from a file that he could do everything he needed. This is actually very easy to implement (even as a stop-gap before SFIO in 2.0) because all configuration code passes around a pseudo-global cmd_parms.
It would be trivial to add another two fields to that to put in a callback with arbitrary void *data pointer. Then only one or two places need to know about the callback. This is a desirable change for mod_perl because it would mean mod_perl needs access to fewer of the core functions. It could be used to implement some other config mechanisms ... but I doubt it could be used to do SNMP. SNMP mgmt seems like a hard thing to integrate into apache. With the way config works in present day apache it is possible to do it only at start/restart time. snmp and telnet interfaces would seem really hard to retrofit... I'm assuming you want to do something while it's live and running. And some of the optimizations I mumble about (and have implemented already) involve doing pre-calculations at config time to save time in the critical path. It'd suck to have to redo these calculations (and respawn all the children) with every line entered in a telnet window :) Or maybe I'm confused by what you want. Dean On Mon, 18 Aug 1997, Randy Terbush wrote: > Since Dean just raised the question in gui-dev about "what are > ya'll up to" I thought I would post back to this list a brief > synopsis of what the 2 or 3 active persons are working on since it > is somewhat relevant to discussions about config file syntax. > > Justin Seiferth and Roman Baron have been working on a Java based > configuration frontend that Justin originally showed us some time > back. http://butler.disa.mil/ApacheConfig/ > > My main feedback to what is going on in this list has been an > attempt to find a common ground protocol that we can give to any > interface developer which would allow any number of text based, > Java, Tcl, etc. interfaces and should provide us some portability > to other platforms like Win32. > > SNMP seems to me to be the logical choice here as there has been an > HTTP MIB under development that I think Harrie Hazewinkel has been > involved with. I've not had success reaching Harrie to get his > feedback on SNMP issues. Perhaps Dirk knows what's up with Harrie? > > As for how this relates to current discussion about added > directives and other configuration languages, I _personally_ think > that abstracting the configuration language out of the core would > be a good thing. Adding SNMP to manipulate the servers > configuration data directly would offer a rather standard API that > could even be portable to other web servers given that they could > adopt the same public standard. Feedback from Harrie on this issue > would be very helpful. > > Given a config API to work with, I personally relish the idea of a > telnet accessed config using similar syntax to that of a cisco > router. > > On disk storage formats could then be optioned to: > > * SQL database > * DB format > * current text format > * Win32 Registry format (god help us) > * etc. > > Obviously all 2.0 issues. > > In a nutshell. Comments solicited. > > -Randy > > > >
