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Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 14:32:14 -0500
From: "William A. Rowe, Jr." <wrowe@rowe-clan.net>
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To: dev@httpd.apache.org
Subject: Re: mod_proxy hooks for clustering and load balancing
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Paul Querna wrote:
> On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 11:46 AM, Jim Jagielski <jim@jagunet.com> wrote:
>>
>> The incremental changes are just so we can keep 2.2's proxy somewhat
>> useful and flexible enough to survive until the next revamp.
> 
> Stop worrying about 2.2, and just focus on doing it right -- then ship
> 2.4 in 3-4 months imo, trunk really isn't that far off from being a
> decent 2.4, it just needs some cleanup in a few areas. It has already
> been 3.5 years since 2.2.0 came out, its time to move on in my
> opinion.

+1.  If there is a 2.2 /bug/ let's fix it.  If the mod_proxy crew wants to
offer a proof-of concept, 2.4 preview as its own download, terrific!  But
I'm quite -1 to fundamentally modifying the structure or feature set that
ships for 2.2-stable.  The recent history in 2.2 of de-stable-izing changes
to the released branch, and incomplete features, leaves me pretty frustrated
with the lack of review.

Before /not/ voting -1 to bringing in these major changes, I'd need to see
issues.apache.org seriously purged of its 95 incidents, many of them new and
most of them actively triaged by our users@ community and some dedicated
dev@s.  I'd need to see balancer /actually documented/ in a way that users
can read and that is partitioned by the module that is loaded.

We should experiment freely on trunk/ to come up with the right solutions,
and also freely discard those solutions from the next release branch.  But
we shouldn't throw changes willy nilly over to 2.2, but as Paul says, let's
focus on making 2.4 "the best available version of Apache" with all of the
new facilities that come with it.

What is especially scary is that the providers are still all using mod_proxy
for their entire config schema, for directives which make no sense to any
other proxy provider.  It would be great to see some serious cleanup, in
addition to all the enthusiasm to expand mod_proxy.