Mailing List Archive

In reply to Robert S. Thau who said
>
> I wouldn't put NCSA compatibilty too high on the list. What will make
> people switch to Apache is the fact that it's doing things right.
>
> Maybe for you, and for a few people like you. However, I suspect a
> whole lot of people will be more interested in compatibility than in
> anyone's strict notion of "correctness" --- heck, look at the behavior
> of the people on this list. For the most part, it's the *ultimate*
> early-adopter crowd, and yet I had trouble getting people to even look
> at Shambhala until it emulated enough of the old behavior that it
> could be dropped in to peoples' existing setups.

Well, there's three issues of compatibilty:

1) Feature list -- I'd expect to be able to anything I could do with
my old server.

2) Configuration files -- It's nice that my old NCSA/Apache files "just
work" but if we stick with this compatibilty issue then we'll just keep
hacking more and more extensions to it until it becomes impossible to
understand and maintain.

A new config format is needed.

3) Same behaviour for undefined situations -- this is the difficult one
and where I'd say doing things "right" is better than keeping old bugs.
Otherwise why bother using Apache? I might as well stick with NCSA if
Apache is just another server that gets it wrong :-)

--
Paul Richards, Bluebird Computer Systems. FreeBSD core team member.
Internet: paul@FreeBSD.org, http://www.freebsd.org/~paul
Phone: 0370 462071 (Mobile), +44 1222 457651 (home)

> Well, there's three issues of compatibilty:
>
> 1) Feature list -- I'd expect to be able to anything I could do with
> my old server.
>
> 2) Configuration files -- It's nice that my old NCSA/Apache files "just
> work" but if we stick with this compatibilty issue then we'll just keep
> hacking more and more extensions to it until it becomes impossible to
> understand and maintain.
>
> A new config format is needed.

If so why not have a compile time flag -DNEW_CFG, with the default
being to use 0.6.5 compatible config files.
If the new system has any real advantages, people will move to it.

It's not so much that Apache users are stuborn conservatives, the
important point is that we promoted it as an improved plug in NCSA
replacement.

--
http://nqcd.lanl.gov/~hartill/

From: Paul Richards <paul@netcraft.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Redirect problem

In reply to Rob Hartill who said
> [SNIP]
> Apache acts on the Redirect before expanding the ScriptAlias.
> Same is probably true for Alias.
>
> We'll need to make this Apache/NCSA compatible.

A more correct approach would be to issue an error for ambiguous
declarations.

I have to admit that this pushes even my limit for NCSA
bug-compatibility, but given that it is trivial to arrange for
compatible behavior (rearranging the order of the modules in modules.c
so that the alias_module has priority), I'm not sure I see a good
reason *not* to be compatible.

(BTW, I agree that relying on the current behavior for this particular
case is a pretty dicey proposition --- but for whatever it's worth, I
have already quietly fixed a similar problem, which was that you
couldn't override the UserDir feature for a particular user with an
Alias because of the internal priority order, after the disk with
someone's home directory went off-line, and that started crashing my
server).

I wouldn't put NCSA compatibilty too high on the list. What will make
people switch to Apache is the fact that it's doing things right.

Maybe for you, and for a few people like you. However, I suspect a
whole lot of people will be more interested in compatibility than in
anyone's strict notion of "correctness" --- heck, look at the behavior
of the people on this list. For the most part, it's the *ultimate*
early-adopter crowd, and yet I had trouble getting people to even look
at Shambhala until it emulated enough of the old behavior that it
could be dropped in to peoples' existing setups.

rst

On Wed, 12 Jul 1995, Robert S. Thau wrote:
> I wouldn't put NCSA compatibilty too high on the list. What will make
> people switch to Apache is the fact that it's doing things right.
>
> Maybe for you, and for a few people like you. However, I suspect a
> whole lot of people will be more interested in compatibility than in
> anyone's strict notion of "correctness" --- heck, look at the behavior
> of the people on this list.

-DASSBACKWARDS, anyone? :)

Brian

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