Mailing List Archive

Newt backhand pre release.
Over the last few weeks many issues have been brought to my attention
concerning mod_backhand. So, after some work I have a new release...
almost. The problem is that I don't have access to all the platforms I
'claim' that mod_backhand supports ;) Nor do I have enough time to try
to test mod_backhand with different versions of Apache in every capacity
on every platform.

I only forsee compilation problems which compiling statically (as
nothing has really changed in the shared module compilation). I know
there are no bumps under Linux and Solaris. But there may be a few
linke to fix up in the build process for the BSDs. This release should
be more stable than 1.0.8.

It all began with a problem on Solaris. Somehow if you dlopen() and
then dlopen() inside of dlopen()ed code, things go awry. I am not sure
why this is and I have stared at the code for far too long. The easy
cure: don't do that! How? Make it possible for people to compile
mod_backhand statically. So, I did... You can now compile mod_backhand
into Apache statically (just leave off the --enable-shared=backhand
argument to configure)

As far as I know, this issue only effects mod_backhand under Solaris.

On a side note, several bad bugs were fixed:
1) Fixed sloppy code in the redirection function. Safer now. Used to
cause occasional seg faults on requests that had content length (POSTS)
-- unitialized pointer.
2) the MAXSERVERS defined was set to 256 and should have been
HARD_SERVER_LIMIT. This would cause core dumps of the backhand resource
manager if you changed the HARD_SERVER_LIMIT in Apache but not in
mod_backhand. This is fixed.
3) Some compilation warning/errors fixed (Thanks Dmitry Khrustalev
<dima@bog.msu.su>)
4) now comes with a autoconf style configure script to build it with
apxs. (Thanks Alex Vorobiev <sasha@mathforum.com>)

This pre release is stable (famous last words). Once I see that it
compiles on all supported platforms, it wil become 1.0.9.

I URGE sites that experience occasional "Document contains no data"
errors to upgrade as I believe I have fixed that problem.

Thank you all for your interest in mod_backhand! It was fun writing it,
but it's use out in the real world is what makes maintaining it
enjoyable.

--
Theo Schlossnagle
33131B65/2047/71 F7 95 64 49 76 5D BA 3D 90 B9 9F BE 27 24 E7