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
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