From phk at phk.freebsd.dk Tue Jan 5 09:40:48 2010 From: phk at phk.freebsd.dk (Poul-Henning Kamp) Date: Tue, 05 Jan 2010 09:40:48 +0000 Subject: Varnish Status & happy MMX Message-ID: <97267.1262684448@critter.freebsd.dk> Happy New Year to all Varnish users! I know a lot of you have a lot riding on Varnish, and having been in the far end of the food-chain for many years myself, I know that it's nice to be able to plan ahead a bit, so this email is sort of a heads-up for you guys. Releases: --------- I have a couple of significant, not backwards compatible, VCL changes I want to get in before we branch a 3.x, and hopefully this will be done "Real Soon Now" so 3.0.0 can be released in Q1. 2.x may have a release or two in it more, but it will probably not receive too many new features once 3.x is out. Varnish is a pretty small project, man-power wise, and keeping more than one branch and the trunk alive, is presently beyond our means. We will of course patch any security holes found in 2.x, but that is probably the extent of our warranty. VUG-meeting: ------------ We had a good one in London, and I think our Dutch allies plan to invite us to Amsterdam at some point in 2010, but I do not know the details. VML: ---- The "Varnish Moral License" (http://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/) is taking off, and that will allow me to spend more quality time with Varnish in the coming months. I want to thank the Varnish Users who stepped up to the plate: Varnish is Open Source Software, and free to download, but in the end nothing comes from nothing, but my kids eat food too. I also want to thank the people who sent me X-mas gifts from my Amazon wishlist: Much appreciated guys! The "VML" time will be used for what I call "generally puttering around": adding features, improving things and fixing bugs and inconveniences. We have some features high on the collective wishlist, and I will generally aim for them, but sometimes a detour results in a better long term result, than applying a bulldozer would do, so apologies in advance, if I seem to wander aimlessly around: I probably have a plan for it. (I won't get technical in this email, keep an eye on the varnish-misc mailing list for that stuff). Bug-Reports: ------------ We need to get better at dealing with the bug-reports you guys send in. We will try to do a ticket-review once per week and get you guys prompt responses. On the other hand, I will ruthlessly close any ticket with insufficient data or lack of feedback from the originator. In such cases, feel free to reopen the ticket with more information. Also, please don't get offended if I close your ticket because it is a feature request: I prefer to move those to the "Shopping list", to keep the bugs from drowning in good ideas. Wiki, Trac & Docs: ------------------- We are short-handed on the documentation side but I will try to put in more of an effort. Somebody[tm] should really write a Varnish book (You know who You are! :-) We are happy to hand out wiki-write bits to anyone who asks, and your help with improving the wiki and documentation is much appreciated. (The only reason we don't give all new Trac-users a wiki-write bit automatically, is to keep trac-spammers away.) I will conclude with the admonition found at the bottom of many restaurants menus: If you like Varnish, tell your friends. If you do not, tell us. Happy 2010! Poul-Henning -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 phk at FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.