Apache 2.0beta1 Released

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After two long years of development he Apache Group is pleased to announce

the release of the first public beta release of Apache 2.0.

Apache 2.0 offers numerous enhancements, improvements and performance

boosts over the 1.3 codebase. The most visible and noteworthy addition

is the ability to run Apache in a hybrid thread/process mode on any

platform that supports both threads and processes. This has shown to

improve the scalability of the Apache HTTPD server significantly in

our early testing, on some versions of Unix. With this version of Apache,

we have also added support for filtered I/O. This allows modules to modify

the output of other modules before it is sent to the client. This release also

greatly improves the performance and robustness of Apache on the

Microsoft Windows Operating Systems. This beta includes support for IPv6

on all platforms that support IPv6.

This version of Apache is known to work on many versions of Unix, BeOS,

OS/2, and Windows. Because of many of the advancements in Apache 2.0,

Apache performs equally on all supported platforms.

There are new snapshots of the Apache httpd source available every 6

hours from http://dev.apache.org/from-cvs/apache-2.0/ - please

download and test if you feel brave. We don't guarantee anything

except that it will take up disk space, but if you have the time and

skills, please give it a spin on your platforms.

Apache has been the most popular web server on the Internet since

April of 1996. The May 2000 WWW server site survey by Netcraft (see:

http://www.netcraft.co.uk/Survey/) found that more web servers were

using Apache than any other software running on more than 60% of the

Internet web servers.

For more information, please check out http://www.apache.org/httpd.html

Changes with Apache 2.0b1

*) Apache is now IPv6-capable. On systems where APR supports IPv6,

Apache gets IPv6 listening sockets by default. Additionally, the

Listen, NameVirtualHost, and <VirtualHost> directives support IPv6

numeric address strings (e.g., "Listen [fe80::1]:8080").

[Jeff Trawick]

*) Modify the install directory layout. Modules are now installed in

modules/. Shared libraries should be installed in libraries/, but

we don't have any of those on Unix yet. All install directories

are modifyable at configure time. [Ryan Bloom]

*) Install all header files in the same directory on Unix. [Ryan Bloom]

*) Get the functions in server/linked into the server, regardless of

which modules linked into the server. This uses the same hack

for Apache that we use for APR and apr-util to ensure all of the

necessary functions are linked. As a part of thise, the CHARSET_EBCDIC

was renamed to AP_CHARSET_EBCDIC for namespace protection, and to make

the scripts a bit easier.

[Ryan Bloom]

*) Rework the RFC1413 handling to make it thread-safe, use a timeout

on the query, and remove IPv4 dependencies. [Jeff Trawick]

*) Get all of the auth modules to the point that they will install and

be loadable into the server. Our new build/install mechanism expects

that all modules will have a common name format. The auth modules

didn't use that format, so we didn't install them properly.

[Ryan Bloom]

*) API routines ap_pgethostbyname() and ap_pduphostent() are no longer

available. Use apr_getaddrinfo() instead. [Jeff Trawick]

*) Get "NameVirtualHost *" working in 2.0. [Ryan Bloom]

*) Return HTTP_RANGE_NOT_SATISFIABLE if the every range requested starts

after the end of the response. [Ryan Bloom]

*) Get byterange requests working with responses that do not have a

content-length. Because of the way byterange requests work, we have to

have all of the data before we can actually do the byterange, so we

can compute the content-length in the byterange filter.

[Ryan Bloom]

*) Get exe CGI's working again on Windows.

[Allan Edwards]

*) Get mod_cgid and mod_rewrite to work as DSOs by changing the way

they keep track of whether or not their post config hook has been

called before. Instead of a static variable (which is replaced when

the DSO is loaded a second time), use userdata in the process pool.

[Jeff Trawick]