Hi all, since version 1.4-dev4 released about 2 months ago, some less noticeable but important changes have been merged. Most of these changes were done to prepare the possibility of supporting keep-alive without breaking already working code and configs. It took a lot of time because I found it was even more difficult than I would have intially thought to correctly process the Connection header when we're in the middle of two agents which don't necessarily agree and don't even necessarily speak the same HTTP version. That alone explains why some the GIT history shows many commits canceling part of the work brought by other commits.
But now this has settled down a bit. Yesterday I could finally complete the Connection header handling. And today, for the first time, I was able to correctly exchange and process multiple requests in a same TCP connection. This was with awful experimental code that I wrote just to check what was still missing, but it did work, for the first time ever. Don't be happy too early, there are still a lot of issues to overcome before we can claim keep-alive support, but I find that the lower layers are getting in shape for that, and that's a good sign. I now get more confident that at least some subset of keep-alive will be available in 1.4. I plan to work on this a bit next week-end in order to issue 1.4-dev5. It should not have any visible changes, except the bugs that were fixed, the stats page additions that Krzysztof contributed some time ago and a few such things. For this reason, I find it is the right time to release another development version, because it will constitute a check point before more sensible changes later. Also, it *might* be possible that we can get some basic stickiness ready for 1.4 too, though I will make no promise :-) So... stay tuned! Willy
