“At the end of last month’s article, I announced that the Apache
Group was ready to release the first Beta of Apache 2.0. If you
have been watching the news coming from the Apache Group, you have
probably noticed that the beta has not been released yet. This
month, I will discuss why the first beta was not released, what has
changed since last month, and our current plans for the first
beta.”
“All of the Apache 2.0 alphas have suffered from one problem,
mod_include didn’t work. Obviously this is a major problem, many
web sites rely on Server Side Includes to create dynamic web pages.
In Apache 1.3 this module was implemented as a handler, meaning
that SSIs had to be stored on disk. With Apache 2.0, it makes more
sense to implement mod_include as a filter, this allows SSIs to be
implemented as files on disk, the output from CGI scripts, or as
the output from any other module. However, re-writing mod_include
as a filter turned out to be a non-trivial problem. After weeks of
work, mod_include has been completed, and it now works as a
filter.”
“While waiting for mod_include, we also discovered that piped
logs, notably reliable piped logs, had a major problem. We were
checking to determine if the pipe between Apache and the logging
program was still writable. If not, Apache assumed the logging
process had died, and restarted it. The problem is that operating
systems will report that the pipe is unwritable in multiple
situations, and only one of those is that the process has actually
stopped reading. For example, we were seeing Apache stop and
restart the logging process if the pipe was full. This means that
when the piped log process is at its busiest, Apache was stopping
and restarting the logging process.”