On Jun 3, 2009, at 14:09, Joachim Zobel wrote:
Am Mittwoch, den 03.06.2009, 11:08 -0400 schrieb Akins, Brian:
It would be interesting if we ditched the current configuration
system and just used lua.
This does IMHO not address any of the problems users usually have and
that are mainly due to a lack of validation.
See
http://people.apache.org/~rbowen/presentations/apacheconEU2005/hate_apache.pdf
for what I consider a good description of the current problems.
That presentation was at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I like to
flatter myself that it spurred some real changes, and some of the
stuff mentioned in there has since been fixed.
Having said that, I'm torn on this mod_lua thing. Yes, obviously, it
would improve the flexibility of the configuration, but, having spent
10+ years doing end-user support on the mailing list and on IRC, I can
tell you that our users are not ready to have to learn a programming
language in order to configure their virtual hosts. We would see a
mass exodus of our user base, or, more probably, a complete refusal to
move off of 2.2. This would be a huge shame, with so many awesome new
things just about to see the light of day.
On the other hand, our current vhost configuration syntax makes me
want to kick puppies, and any solution that makes mod_rewrite
unnecessary has my strong support.
The <If> directive, along with better documentation, would solve 50%
of what people use mod_rewrite for. A less painful way to configure
dynamic virtual hosts would solve another 15%. And a healthy dose of
education about all the gross misconceptions called "SEO" would solve
the rest.
Yes, we need some kind of macro thingy in the configuration. And while
I think that most of us reading this email thread can handle that
thingy being Lua, I honestly don't believe that the folks over on the
users@ list can, unless it's something that can be embedded into
existing configurations, rather than being the entirety of the
configuration.
--
Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.
Oscar Levant
