Ask Apache Software Chairman Greg Stein

Here's a man who obviously has his finger on the pulse of open source software development. I mean, who hasn't heard of Apache? His work history is interesting, too: He's moved from Microsoft to CollabNet to Google. And he's not shy about speaking his mind about open source, as shown in this ZDNet blog entry. Please try to confine yourself to one question per post. (If you have more than one question, post more than once.) We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Greg tomorrow and run his answers when we get them back.

Apache 1.x vs. 2.x

[filesiteguy]

I'd like to know what the continuing direction is going to be for support on 1.x - which is being used by the majority of webservers I see - and 2.x - which is what is being distributed in most recent operating system packages, such as Linux. Are you planning on supporting 1.x forever or ending support at some point and forging on with 2.x?

2.2 - wait for it

[PhYrE2k2]

Wait for 2.2 (currently 2.1) to go stable.
The lingering daemon functionality that was provided externally in 1.3 is back and in core 2.2.

This will be a huge boost for large providers to serve more connections and provide good reason.

At present, I recommend 2.x just because it's closer to 2.2 (and hence involves less configuration and setup quirks later on)- They're about equal now with the prefork.

I'd say that people expected a huge benefit, but didn't quite get it right away. In a Web server, it just needs to work, and both worked- so why upgrade for slightly slower performance and no additional features. What people failed to realize is that changing this framework around provides long-term growth and renews the project to increase its extensibility such as module ordering in the long term.
As that long term comes now, you'll see a lot more move to that as the gains keep showing up, now that the framework is stable.
-M