On 21 Dec 2014, at 10:48 PM, Eric Covener <cove...@gmail.com> wrote: > I don't see how adding expression or <Location> support as > necessitating, or benefiting in a meaningful way, from the deprecation > / movement of the "other" directives. I am assuming the *match > directives could either a) provide their own contexts for the > back-references to work or b) simply have their 2nd parameter > evaluated the way it is today.
The expression support is a superset of the regex support, making the regex support redundant. The *Match parameters are self contained, you cannot make a backreference outside the scope of that single directive. In contrast the LocationMatch/DirectoryMatch sections are not self contained, their backreferences are exposed to expressions and can be used and reused in many unrelated directives. I have heard growing criticism of httpd for being too complicated, and this is an attempt to address that. Supporting 7 directives to do the job of just 3 makes people’s eyes bleed. The aim of the _compat module is to ensure that existing users are not left in the lurch, they load the compat module and life continues as before. We already have clear precedence of this working well - major changes occurred between httpd v2.2 and v2.4 in authnz and this passed by without any notable problems. Regards, Graham —
