Date: Tue, 28 Mar 1995 12:04:24 -0800 (PST)
From: Brian Behlendorf <brian@wired.com>
To: New httpd project <new-httpd@hyperreal.com>
Subject: Re: announce Apache
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On Tue, 28 Mar 1995, Rob Hartill wrote:
> I don't remember reading any negative feedback to the suggestion
> of announcing the existence of apache in the near future.
> 
> Shall we at least go public and tell the world there's a "new" free
> server in the pipeline ?
> 
> We'll need some online info. Can we put it on hyperreal Brian ?
> and if so, is there a danger that Joe Average will then stumble
> on our area of the server too soon ?
> 
> Any ideas on how/what we should announce ?

Here's my thoughts:

Create a new top-level domain on hyperreal's web/ftp area, /apache/, that 
has the public distribution and documentation.  If people can find 
/httpd/ on their own then they're probably smart enough to know how to 
deal with what they see there.  All public announcements will only 
contain links to /apache/.  

In the documentation there's a page on "how to contribute to the apache
project".  It says something like: "Warning! The mailing list where the
contributors discuss the project has a tremendous amount of traffic, so mail
filtering is advised.  Furthermore this is *not* a support mailing list, a
certain level of experience with installing web servers is expected.  
Click *here* to signify that you understand this."  That will be a link 
to a page with information on how to subscribe to new-httpd.

I don't think 0.3 is ready for release, nor will 0.4.  After 0.4, let's 
do a cleanup on the code to get it to compile cleanly under -Wall, call 
that apache 0.5, and let it go.  I'd also really like to see the CERT 
patch made a compile-time define before it's sent to the world, where 
people install it on heavily-hit machines and their servers melt and we 
get blamed...

We should emphasize in the release message (sent *only* to www-talk) that,
aside from content-negotiation or custom error messages or any other feature
extension that makes it into 0.4, apache is pretty much a drop-in replacement
for NCSA httpd and uses all the same configuration files.  Also, all 
feature extensions are just more lines in configuration files, not 
changes to existing lines.

Our relationship with NCSA is one of synergy - we also have slightly
different goals it seems, NCSA being focused on large issues like the
no-forking process model while we're focused on bug fixes smaller feature
enhancements.  The key word should be synergy. 

If I think of some more I'll post.  Now for another Dimetapp....

	Brian

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