There's a couple of conflicting demands by our users, and spending
time on the users mailing list and on the IRC channel is a great way
to see this first-hand.
They don't want to learn a new syntax. And they want a new syntax
that lets them do what they mean.
And they're very frustrated when they can't do things that are
obviously what everyone wants, and have to resort to mod_rewrite.
Now, I'm very fond of mod_rewrite, because, after all, I wrote a
book, and royalties from that book buy me my toys.
But the time spent answering the same questions again and again on
IRC lead me to believe that there are certain features that would
gain us a lot of appreciation from our users - the folks who, at
least to me, make this stuff worth doing. Easy for me to say, since I
just document what the rest of you guys actually do. I recognize that
it looks easy from the cheap seats.
Virtual hosts are just one example of something that's amazingly hard
(for beginners) to get right, and very easy to get wrong. And when
it's wrong, it's unpredictably wrong, in ways that are hard to
anticipate.
On Mar 26, 2008, at 09:06, Nick Kew wrote:
There seems to be a demand for dynamic per-request configuration,
as evidenced by the number of users hacking it with mod_rewrite,
and the other very limited tools available. Modern mod_rewrite
usage commonly looks like programming, but it's not designed as
a programming language. Result: confused and frustrated users.
...
<if [some-per-request-expr]>
Directives applicable per-request
(anything, subject to per-directive context checking)
</if>
++1. This would solve an enormous number of the user problems that we
experience on the help channels, which, I have to assume, are but the
tip of the iceberg of problems experienced out there in the real
world. It's amazing, sometimes, what absurd lengths folks have to go
to, to solve the problems that they've created.
A noble objective: render mod_rewrite obsolete :-)
++1
--
What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few
of us left.
Oscar Levant
