On 8 Jul 2011, at 20:43, Jeff Trawick wrote: > Here's one attempt at approaching the question of features and > veto-ability. This is of course just my > understanding^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hopinion.
Thanks for opening this, abstracted from current disagreements. > The presence of most features in APR is highly subjective. I.e., > there's no technical requirement for APR that says it must or must not > have the LDAP or memcached or various other features. Whether or not > it is present is not veto-able. The group of developers must > collectively agree on the feature set. Presence or absence both not veto-able? Not entirely convinced that's meaningful, unless we reformulate to refer to addition/removal of features - i.e. changes to the status quo. > The manner in which an APR feature is implemented has a handful of > technical characteristics which should be met. Incompatibility with > the basic technical characteristics is veto-able. Providing a feature > which uses a different memory management mechanism or different kind > of programming interface or a mixture of APR and non-APR programming > interfaces are examples of technical characteristics which are > objectively incorrect. > > APR versioning rules place specific restrictions w.r.t. version > boundaries on removals of features which don't meet requirements or > additions of features which do. Breaking any of the versioning rules > while adding or removing features is veto-able. Agreed. Maybe this wants a hypothetical question. Suppose I want to introduce an HTML parser to APR. Assuming I make it technically a good fit, what threshold of acceptance would I need to pass to introduce apr_html module, and what would someone opposed to it need to veto it? > LDAP specifically: > > Deficiencies in the LDAP interface were identified and not addressed > over a large period of time. The group of developers sharing an > opinion made clear the required technical corrections which must be > made in order for the LDAP feature could remain for APR 2.0. In fact > this was a compromise position, compared with the more extreme and > well supported position of removing it entirely instead of fixing it. > No APR developer besides Graham was aware of any progress on > correcting the deficiencies over that time. Wasn't the primary argument against apr_ldap that it failed to add any real value to using LDAP APIs directly? Incompleteness against some reference API is neither here nor there: many APR modules provide very limited [foo] APIs compared to a native [foo] library. > The presence of LDAP in trunk without correction was veto-able. The > removal of LDAP in trunk was not veto-able, as it merely was the > default resolution to satisifying the technical objections expressed > previously. Importantly, removing it from trunk didn't prevent the > deficiencies from being corrected. (But we can't go down this path > far without consideration of httpd actions, since httpd is the one > identified user.) Not sure I'd agree with that. Once it's made it as far as a release version then shouldn't it be changes to that status quo that are veto-able? But maybe I'm failing to grasp the magnitude of apr_ldap defects. BTW, some years back I wrote a couple of HTTPD modules for a .edu client, using apr_ldap in at least one of them. I'm sure there are others floating around that'll need updating. -- Nick Kew Available for work, contract or permanent http://www.webthing.com/~nick/cv.html
