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Date: Tue,
 14 Sep 2004 11:21:15 -0400 (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Est_=28heure_d'=E9t=E9=29?=)
From: Joshua Slive <joshua@slive.ca>
To: docs@httpd.apache.org
Cc: dev@httpd.apache.org
Subject: Re: Shorten the default config and the distribution (was: IfModule
 in the Default Config)
In-Reply-To: <20040914081402.00004bcc@fe-pc-092.int.cinetic.de>
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On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, [ISO-8859-15] Andr� Malo wrote:
> A >30 KB default config, which nobody outside this circle here
> really understands, isn't helpful - especially for beginners.

I agree that the current config file is too big and ugly.  But let's be a 
little careful here.  There needs to be a balance.  Detailed config files 
do help users understand the capabilities of the server and make it much 
easier to activate features.

So I suggest we talk about specifics, rather than just trying to reduce 
the size.  For example:

- Can we get rid of the non-unix mpm stuff from the default config. 
(Don't mean to offend os/2 and beos (and possibly netware), but they are 
really superfluous and confusing for most people.)

- Can we get rid of most of the AddLanguage/AddCharset directives?  They 
are a constant source of bug reports, and I really can't imagine that many 
people use them as-is.  (Do people really name their files 
index.html.utf32be.el?)

The above two changes alone would get rid of almost 200 lines.

>
> In the same cycle we could remove the docs from the default distribution and
> start distributing them officially as separate packages. (But we could
> distribute a separate config snippet for the multilingual docs, which can
> be included in the httpd.conf). The more translations we add, the less
> applicable is it to include the whole doc tree.

+1

Joshua.
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