On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 16:18, Ryan Bloom <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 10:07 AM, William A. Rowe, Jr. <[email protected]> > wrote: >> Ryan Bloom wrote: >> > Why do you want to jettison "edge platforms"? The original goal was to >> > keep HTTPd as portable as 1.3 was, which meant APR had to support >> > mainframes, OS/2, etc. All of those edge platforms are what made APR >> > challenging to create and maintain, but they also provide a lot of value >> > for the people who want their code to work on mainframes, but don't want >> > to write their own portability library. >> > >> > Removing this support takes away a web server (at the very least) from >> > openBeOS, OS400, OS/2, etc. While these platforms may not be mainstream >> > these days, dropping support for them from HTTPd (the natural result of >> > dropping support from APR) seems like a decision that can only be made >> > after discussion with APR's users, not the developers of APR itself. >> >> I pulled support win 95/98/ME support from httpd because the operating >> system is abandoned. We should drop 'fringe' OS's that are no longer >> maintained by anyone. Those uses can certainly still use existing apps >> developed long ago for apr, and 0.9/1.x would still get critical security >> or bug fixes, but moving forwards nobody wants the complaints on those >> platforms which can't be resolved when platform issues occur, eh? > > The comparison to 95/98/ME is also a bit disingenuous. Those aren't, and > never were, intended to be server platforms, they are consumer operating > systems, and were marketed as such. The others were marketed as server > operating systems, and I believe are still in use today.
Eh? WTF does "server" have to do with anything? APR is a runtime for *all* applications. APR's second largest consumer is SVN, and it runs on desktops all over the planet. If Apache weren't so freakin' popular, I might actually say there are more installs of the svn client than the httpd server. (fwiw, I typically say there are 5-10 million svn users) So back to Bill's point: dropping platforms is fine and, I believe, warranted, so that we can focus more heavily on the platforms that matter *today*. It's got nothing to do with "server". >> Is BeOS gone? Is OS/2 gone yet? Netware is effectively gone, AIUI, as >> it's a maintenance-only phase out cycle. > > It makes sense to drop support when the OS has effectively been dropped by > its manufacturer, and the userbase is gone. BeOS is dead, but OpenBeOS > still exists as an open source effort. OS/2 is still in wide use in banks > in Europe the last I heard. Mainframes are still in wide use and support by > their manufacturers. NetWare, don't know frankly. OpenBeOS ... I bet you they have a posix layer that we can build against. (if not, then they're sucking on a dearth of software...) Think those banks will be using APR? Not me. Mainframes? Run Linux on them. NetWare? It's in maintenance, so I doubt they're going to *rebuild* against an APR 2.x library. > The fact that I we just saw mainframe patches go into the tree (what started > this whole conversation), and I vaguely remember seeing NetWare patches in > the last 6 months or so indicates that there is still some level of support > for developing on those platforms. That's not what started it. I think that APR is outside of its scope, and wanted to ask about getting back to basics: provide platform portability, not APIs for third-party libraries. Cheers, -g
