Mailing List Archive

At 01:45 PM 9/20/95 MDT, you wrote:
>
>Anyone want to stake a claim on making the announcement of 0.8.14 ?
>
>It should be a note to be dropped into comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix
>including the changelog (or an abbreviated version of it). You might
>also want to say that this is now very close to being a 1.0 release
>(assuming nobody objects to that statement).

Hmm... after we get all of the SCO stuff undercontrol, and that has been
tested, I think we should go through the code, and start cleaning it up a
little. Run it through a couple of filters just to get the coding structure
looking the same, add a little more debuging where necessary..... and
maybe we can call it 1.0 I guess by 0.8.16? May 17?

--
Aram W. Mirzadeh, MIS Manager, Qosina Corporation
http://www.qosina.com/~awm/, awm@qosina.com
Apache httpd server team http://www.apache.org

At 10:03 PM 9/20/95 BST, you wrote:
>> The SCO stuff, yes.
>>
>> As for "cleaning up and filters.." I strongly disagree.
>>
>> 1. The code goes through -Wall just fine.

This really doesn't mean anything...

>>
>> 2. RST spent a good deal of time doing just this and I don't
>> know of any areas that are not 100% better than the base
>> code they were taken from.
>>
>> 3. The code is proving to be *very* stable at this point.
>> Cleanup may have the opposite effect.

I don't agree with this. I think the features will introduce more problems
than cleaning up the code.

>>
>> 4. It's time to lift the feature ban.
>
>
>Whaaaat? ;) cleaning up the code won't have any effect on the system's
>stability or -Wall'ability. lifting the feature ban will introduce
>a truck load of new and funky stuff which will charge around smashing
>plates and throwing up on your sofa. There are still bugs and IMHO
>the server is not *very* stable.

Really? I thought the server was very stable. What kind of problems
are you having with stability?

<Aram>

--
Aram W. Mirzadeh, MIS Manager, Qosina Corporation
http://www.qosina.com/~awm/, awm@qosina.com
Apache httpd server team http://www.apache.org

But hey, what do people think.

I think that lifting the feature ban and doing another round of cleanups
might both be good ideas soon, but *after* 1.0. The reason for the feature
freeze is that we're trying (throughout this looong beta cycle) to stabilize
the existing features; adding new features might break the old ones. The
same logic applies to cleanups which *ought* to have no effect on server
functionality --- there's always the risk of screwups, which break something.

If the cleanups are done at the beginning of a release cycle, then we have
time to find and correct whatever (potentially subtle) bugs they might have
introduced. Right now, when we are near the end of a release cycle, I think
that any changes which don't fix something which is clearly broken is a
mistake.

rst

>
> But hey, what do people think.
>
> I think that lifting the feature ban and doing another round of cleanups
> might both be good ideas soon, but *after* 1.0. The reason for the feature
> freeze is that we're trying (throughout this looong beta cycle) to stabilize
> the existing features; adding new features might break the old ones. The
> same logic applies to cleanups which *ought* to have no effect on server
> functionality --- there's always the risk of screwups, which break something.
>
> If the cleanups are done at the beginning of a release cycle, then we have
> time to find and correct whatever (potentially subtle) bugs they might have
> introduced. Right now, when we are near the end of a release cycle, I think
> that any changes which don't fix something which is clearly broken is a
> mistake.

I'm with you on this. I still want to know if anyone knows what the current
bug list is.

>
> rst

--
Ben Laurie Phone: +44 (181) 994 6435
Freelance Consultant Fax: +44 (181) 994 6472
and Technical Director Email: ben@algroup.co.uk (preferred)
A.L. Digital Ltd, benl@fear.demon.co.uk (backup)
London, England.

[.Note for the paranoid: "fear" as in "Fear and Loathing
in Las Vegas", "demon" as in Demon Internet Services, a
commercial Internet access provider.]

> > tested, I think we should go through the code, and start cleaning it up a
> > little. Run it through a couple of filters just to get the coding structure
> > looking the same, add a little more debuging where necessary..... and
> > maybe we can call it 1.0 I guess by 0.8.16? May 17?
> >
> > --
> > Aram W. Mirzadeh, MIS Manager, Qosina Corporation
>
> The SCO stuff, yes.
>
> As for "cleaning up and filters.." I strongly disagree.
>
> 1. The code goes through -Wall just fine.
>
> 2. RST spent a good deal of time doing just this and I don't
> know of any areas that are not 100% better than the base
> code they were taken from.
>
> 3. The code is proving to be *very* stable at this point.
> Cleanup may have the opposite effect.
>
> 4. It's time to lift the feature ban.


Whaaaat? ;) cleaning up the code won't have any effect on the system's
stability or -Wall'ability. lifting the feature ban will introduce
a truck load of new and funky stuff which will charge around smashing
plates and throwing up on your sofa. There are still bugs and IMHO
the server is not *very* stable.

But hey, what do people think.

Ay.

> >Whaaaat? ;) cleaning up the code won't have any effect on the system's
> >stability or -Wall'ability. lifting the feature ban will introduce
> >a truck load of new and funky stuff which will charge around smashing
> >plates and throwing up on your sofa. There are still bugs and IMHO
> >the server is not *very* stable.
>
> Really? I thought the server was very stable. What kind of problems
> are you having with stability?

I used the wrong words. Clearly the thing is stable for those of us
who have grown up with the thing, understand the vagueries of its
documentation and have our config files set up to match the aptitute of
our chosen OS/HW platforms, buuuut, .... that's just us. It doesn't
include the hoard of first-time users who're running on BadUx alpha 0.0.1
with NFS mounted *everything* and a DNS that was set up by a committee of
chimps. It is these 'unforseen' conditions that we should be clearing up,
and which we are clearing up successfully I believe ;)

Again, it's not a case of stability in a calm ordered environment that
concerns me, I'm just assuming that we all wish for at least that. I'm
concerned with the steps we can take to ensure that Apache 1.0 survives
when we release it into harsh environments.


> <Aram>

Ay.