APACHE 2.5 STATUS: -*-text-*-
Last modified at [$Date$]
The current version of this file can be found at:
Documentation status is maintained separately and can be found at:
* docs/STATUS in this source tree, or
Consult the following STATUS files for information on related projects:
Patches considered for backport are noted in their branches' STATUS:
Release history:
[NOTE that x.{odd}.z versions are strictly Alpha/Beta releases,
while x.{even}.z versions are Stable/GA releases.]
2.5.0 : In Development.
Contributors looking for a mission:
* Just do an egrep on "TODO" or "XXX" in the source.
* Review the bug database at: http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/
* Review the "PatchAvailable" bugs in the bug database:
After testing, you can append a comment saying "Reviewed and tested".
* Open bugs in the bug database.
* See also the STATUS file in the docs/ directory, which lists documentation-specific TODO items.
CURRENT RELEASE NOTES:
RELEASE SHOWSTOPPERS:
THINGS THAT SHOULD BE CONSIDERED EARLY IN THE 2.6/3.0 DEVELOPMENT CYCLE:
* Change default prefix from /usr/local/apache2 to something corresponding
to the project name. Rename apachectl.
* Change merge order of <Location> to be most specific match last. This
is more consistent with <Directory> and allows some optimizations for the
location merge code.
* Detect Lua 5.2.0 during configure and add LUA_COMPAT_ALL to CPPFLAGS.
Maybe it even suffices to add LUA_COMPAT_MODULE and individually
care about the two remaining incompatible code lines (one with lua_strlen,
one with lua_objlen).
OLD ISSUES THAT WERE THOUGHT TO BE SHOWSTOPPERS FOR 2.4 BUT OBVIOUSLY WEREN'T:
* Handling of non-trailing / config by non-default handler is broken
jerenkrantz asks: Why should this block a release?
wsanchez agrees: this may be a change in behavior, but isn't
clearly wrong, and even if so, it doesn't seem like a
showstopper.
* the edge connection filter cannot be removed
jerenkrantz asks: Why should this block a release?
stas replies: because it requires a rewrite of the filters stack
implementation (you have suggested that) and once 2.2 is
released you can't do that anymore.
pgollucci: this affects mod_perl I'm pretty sure.
CURRENT VOTES:
* Name the Server (version 2.4 or 3.0, depending on the final call)
Recent discussion indicates we should designate a (short name).
This is not yet a [Vote] - Your nominations please:
* Apache HTTP Server (httpd)
+1: sctemme (why mess with it?), pgollucci
RELEASE NON-SHOWSTOPPERS BUT WOULD BE REAL NICE TO WRAP THESE UP:
* Clean up all the kruft and *extremely* outdated stuff below...
* Maybe remove Limit/LimitExcept or at least make it log warnings when
mis-used.
* Patches submitted to the bug database:
* Filter stacks and subrequests, redirects and fast redirects.
There's at least one PR that suffers from the current unclean behaviour
(which lets the server send garbage): PR 17629
nd says: Every subrequest should get its own filter stack with the
subreq_core filter as bottom-most. That filter does two things:
- swallow EOS buckets
- redirect the data stream to the upper request's (rr->main)
filter chain directly after the subrequest's starting
point.
Once we have a clean solution, we can try to optimize
it, so that the server won't be slow down too much.
* RFC 2616 violations.
Closed PRs: 15852, 15857, 15859, 15861, 15864, 15869, 15870, 16120,
16125, 16135, 16136, 16137, 16138, 16139, 16140, 16518,
16520, 49825
Open PRs: 15865, 15866, 15868, 16126, 16133, 16142, 16521, 42978
jerenkrantz says: need to decide how many we need to backport and/or
if these rise to showstopper status.
out of this list, without reviewing them individually.
* pipes deadlock on all platforms with limited pipe buffers (e.g. both
Linux and Win32, as opposed to only Win32 on 1.3). The right solution
is either GStein's proposal for a "CGI Brigade", or OtherBill's proposal
for "Poll Buckets" for "Polling Filter Chains". Or maybe both :-)
* All handlers should always send content down even if r->header_only
is set. If not, it means that the HEAD requests don't generate the
same headers as a GET which is wrong.
* exec cmd and suexec arg-passing enhancements
Status: Patches proposed
Message-ID: <20020526041748.A29148@prodigy.Redbrick.DCU.IE>
(see the "proc.patch" and "suexec-shell.patch" links in this message)
* The 2.0.36 worker MPM graceless shutdown changes work but are
a bit clunky on some platforms; eg, on Linux, the loop to
join each worker thread seems to hang, and the parent ends up
killing off the child with SIGKILL. But at least it shuts down.
chrisd: Has this been fixed by the changes for PR 38737?
* We do not properly substitute the prefix-variables in the configuration
scripts or generated-configs. (i.e. if sysconfdir is etc,
httpd-std.conf points to conf.)
* If any request gets through ap_process_request_internal() and is
scheduled to be served by the core handler, without a flag that this
r->filename was tested by dir/file_walk, we need to 500 at the very
end of the ap_process_request_internal() processing so sub_req-esters
know this request cannot be run. This provides authors of older
modules better compatibility, while still improving the security and
robustness of 2.0.
Status: still need to decide where this goes, OtherBill comments...
Message-ID: <065701c14526$495203b0$96c0b0d0@roweclan.net>
[Deleted comments regarding the ap_run_handler phase, as irrelevant
as BillS points out that "common case will be caught in
default_handler already (with the r->finfo.filetype == 0 check)"
and the issue is detecting this -before- we try to run the req.]
gregames says: can this happen somehow without a broken module
being involved? If not, why waste cycles trying to defend against
potential broken modules? It seems futile.
wrowe counters: no, it shouldn't happen unless the module is broken.
But the right answer is to fail the request up-front in dir/file
walk if the path was entirely invalid; and we can't do that either
UNTIL 2.1 or we break modules that haven't hooked map_to_storage.
* Can a static httpd be built reliably?
Message-ID: <20020207142751.T31582@clove.org>
* Usage of APR_BRIGADE_NORMALIZE in core_input_filter should be
removed if possible.
Message-ID:
<Pine.LNX.4.33.0201202232430.318-100000@deepthought.cs.virginia.edu>
Jeff wonders if we still care about this. It is no longer an
API issue but simply an extra trip through the brigade.
* Try to get libtool inter-library dependency code working on AIX.
Message-ID: <cm3n10lx555.fsf@rdu163-40-092.nc.rr.com>
Justin says: If we get it working on AIX, we can enable this
on all platforms and clean up our build system somewhat.
Jeff says: I thought I tested a patch for you sometime in
January that you were going to commit within a few days.
* Handling of %2f in URIs. Currently both 1.3 and 2.0
completely disallow %2f in the request URI path (see
ap_unescape_url() in util.c). It's permitted and passed
through in the query string, however. Roy says the
original reason for disallowing it, from five years ago,
was to protect CGI scripts that applied PATH_INFO to
a filesystem location and which might be tricked by
..%2f..%2f(...). We *should* allow path-info of the
Since we've revamped a lot of our processing of path
segments, it would be nice to allow this, or at least
allow it conditionally with a directive.
OtherBill adds that %2f as the SECOND character of a multibyte
sequence causes the request to fail! This happens notably in
the ja-jis encoding.
* There is increasing demand from module writers for an API
that will allow them to control the server à la apachectl.
Reasons include sole-function servers that need to die if
an external dependency (e.g., a database) fails, et cetera.
Perhaps something in the (ever more abused) scoreboard?
On the other hand, we already have a pipe that goes between parent
and child for graceful shutdown events, along with an API that
can be used to send a message down that pipe. In threaded MPMs,
it is easy enough to make that one pipe be used for graceful
and graceless events, and it is also easy to open that pipe
to both parent and child for writing. Then we just need to
figure out how to do graceless on non-threaded MPMs.
* Allow the DocumentRoot directive within <Location > scopes? This
allows the beloved (crusty) Alias /foo/ /somepath/foo/ followed
by a <Directory /somepath/foo> to become simply
<Location /foo/> DocumentRoot /somefile/foo (IMHO a bit more legible
and in-your-face.) DocumentRoot unset would be accepted [and would
not permit content to be served, only virtual resources such as
server-info or server-status.
This proposed change would _not_ depricate Alias.
striker: See the thread starting with Message-ID:
JLEGKKNELMHCJPNMOKHOGEEJFBAA.striker@apache.org.
* Win32: Rotatelogs sometimes is not terminated when Apache
goes down hard. FirstBill was looking at possibly tracking the
child's-child processes in the parent process.
stoddard: Shared scoreboard might offer a good way for the parent
to keep track of 'other child' processes and whack them if the child
goes down.
Other thoughts on walking the process chain using the NT kernel
have also been proposed on APR.
* Eliminate unnecessary creation of pipes in mod_cgid
* Combine log_child and piped_log_spawn. Clean up http_log.c.
Common logging API.
* Platforms that do not support fork (primarily Win32 and AS/400)
Architect start-up code that avoids initializing all the modules
in the parent process on platforms that do not support fork.
* There are still a number of places in the code where we are
losing error status (i.e. throwing away the error returned by a
system call and replacing it with a generic error code)
* Mass vhosting version of suEXEC.
* All DBMs suffer from confusion in support/dbmmanage (perl script) since
the dbmmanage employs the first-matched dbm format. This is not
necessarily the library that Apache was built with. Aught to
rewrite dbmmanage upon installation to bin/ with the proper library
for predictable mod_auth_dbm administration.
Questions; htdbm exists, time to kill dbmmanage, or does it remain
useful as a perl dbm management example? If we keep it,
do we address the issue above?
* Integrate mod_dav.
Some additional items remaining:
- case_preserved_filename stuff
(use the new canonical name stuff?)
- find a new home for ap_text(_header)
- is it possible to remove the DAV: namespace stuff from util_xml?
* ap_core_translate() and its use by mod_mmap_static and mod_file_cache
are a bit wonky. The function should probably be exposed as a utility
function (such as ap_translate_url2fs() or ap_validate_fs_url() or
something). Another approach would be a new hook phase after
"translate" which would allow the module to munge what the
translation has decided to do.
Status: Greg +1 (volunteers)
* Explore use of a post-config hook for the code in http_main.c which
calls ap_fixup_virutal_hosts(), ap_fini_vhost_config(), and
ap_sort_hooks() [to reduce the logic in main()]
* read the config tree just once, and process N times (as necessary)
* (possibly) use UUIDs in mod_unique_id and/or mod_usertrack
* (possibly) port the bug fix for PR 6942 (segv when LoadModule is put
into a VirtualHost container) to 2.0.
* shift stuff to mod_core.h
* callers of ap_run_create_request() should check the return value
for failure (Doug volunteers)
* Fix the worker MPM to use POD to kill child processes instead
of ap_os_killpg, regardless of how they should die.
chrisd: Is this done, by any chance? See r92598 and r93358.
* Scoreboard structures could be changed in the future such that
proper alignment is not maintained, leading to segfaults on
some systems. Cliff posted a patch to deal with this issue but
later recanted. See this message to dev@apr.apache.org:
Message-ID:
<Pine.LNX.4.44.0203011354090.16457-200000@deepthought.cs.virginia.edu>
* APXS either needs to be fixed completely for use when apr is out of tree,
or it should drop query mode altogether, and we just grow an
httpd-config or similar arrangement.
To quote a discussion in STATUS earlier:
thommay: this doesn't fix all the problems with apxs and out of
tree apr/apr-util, but it's a good start. There's still the
query cases; but I'm beginning to think that in these cases
the app should be querying ap{r,u}-config directly
deprecate -q: add htpd-config: gstein, pquerna, minfrin, pgollucci
other:
TODO ISSUES REMAINING IN MOD_SSL:
* SSLRequire directive (parsing of) leaks memory
* ssl_var_lookup could be rewritten to be MUCH faster
WISH LIST
* mod_proxy: Ability to run SSL over proxy gateway connections,
encrypting (or reencrypting) at the proxy.
* mod_cache: Handle ESI tags.
* mod_cache: Resolve issue of how to cache page fragments (or perhaps
-if- we want to cache page fragments). Today, mod_cache/mod_mem_cache
will cache #include 'virtual' requests (but not #include 'file'
requests). This was accomplished by making CACHE_IN a
CONTENT_SET-1 filter to force it to run before the SUBREQ_CORE
filter. But now responses cannot be cached that include the
effects of having been run through CONTENT_SET filters
(mod_deflate, mod_expires, etc). We could rerun all the
CONTENT_SET filters on the cached response, but this will not
work in all cases. For example, mod_expires relies on installing
the EXPIRATION filter during fixups. Contents served out of
mod_cache (out of the quick_handler) bypass -all- the request
line server hooks (Ryan really hated this. It is great for
performance, but bad because of the complications listed above).
* mod_mem_cache: Consider adding a RevalidateTimeout directive to
specify time at which local cached content is to be revalidated
(ie, underlying file stat'ed to see if it has changed).
* mod_mem_cache/mod_cache_disk: Need to be able to query cache
status (num of entries, cache object properties, etc.).
mod_status could be extended to query optional hooks defined
by modules for the purpose of reporting module status.
mod_cache (et. al.) could define optional hooks that are called
to collect status. Status should be queryable by
HTTP or SNMP?
jerenkrantz says: Yawn. Who cares.
* Regex containers don't work in an intutive way
Status: No one has come up with an efficient way to fix this
behavior. Dean has suggested getting rid of regex containers
completely.
OtherBill suggests: We at least seem to agree on eliminating
the <Container ~ foo> forms, and using only
<ContainerMatch foo> semantics.
* orig_ct in the byterange/multipart handling may not be
needed. Apache 1.3 just never stashed "multipart" into
r->content_type. We should probably follow suit since the
byterange stuff doesn't want the rest of the code to see the
multipart content-type; the other code should still think it is
dealing with the <orig_ct> stuff.
Status: Greg volunteers to investigate (esp. since he was most
likely the one to break it :-)
EXPERIMENTAL MODULES:
Experimental modules should eventually be be promoted to fully supported
status or removed from the repository entirely (ie, the
'experiment' failed). This section tracks what needs to happen to
get the modules promoted to fully supported status.