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Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 22:39:12 +0100
From: Nick Kew <nick@webthing.com>
To: dev@httpd.apache.org
Subject: Re: ProxyPass globbing
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On Fri, 11 May 2007 15:19:58 -0400
Jim Jagielski <jim@jaguNET.com> wrote:

> I've been looking at extending ProxyPass to
> accept and use globbing patterns (basically,
> to make it easier for those migrating from
> mod_jk and JkMount to Apache 2.2), and it's
> almost trivially easy, but there are some
> "gotchas":

Two half-thoughts:

Is there a strong reason to prefer globs over regexps?
A regexp doesn't have to be more complex than a glob,
but gives the user who wants it that bit more hack-fu,
and enables things people will want like
ProxyPass	\.(gif|jpe?g|png)$	http://backend/

Second, putting ProxyPass in a Directory context accomplishes
the same thing more simply by enabling <LocationMatch> on it.

>     1. ProxyPass /foo/* balancer://bar
>        should silently rewrite itself to
>         ProxyPass /foo/ balancer://bar
> 
>        In other words, we already assume a prefix
>        glob.  But should we? In other words,
>        there is no difference between /foo/ and /foo/*.

Yes.  The currrent semantics of ProxyPass work well.
We don't want to break them.

>     2. ProxyPass /*.gif balancer://bar
>        How to handle /i/j/jim.gif? Should
>        the resultant proxy request be
>        balancer://bar/i/j/jim.gif (ie: the whole
>        glob) or balancer://bar/jim.gif.
>        I think the former is the most logical
>        and the most unsurprising.

I agree in principle, but I'm a little uneasy about having
inconsistency between that and globbing in <Directory> and family.

> Assuming that the interpretations of #1 and #2
> are semi-universal, any other comments? So, basically,
> we are "just" adding suffix globbing to our already
> existing prefix "globbing"...

+0 (no strong views on it).
+1 if you want to tackle wrowe's comments on my related patch at the 
same time, as I really don't know when I'll have any time for that.


-- 
Nick Kew

Application Development with Apache - the Apache Modules Book
http://www.apachetutor.org/