From phk at phk.freebsd.dk Wed Sep 1 09:30:18 2010 From: phk at phk.freebsd.dk (Poul-Henning Kamp) Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2010 09:30:18 +0000 Subject: Varnish project status Message-ID: <46772.1283333418@critter.freebsd.dk> Now that summer winds down, it is time for me to give you a status update from the Varnish Project: 0. Our new documentation ------------------------ Since the last report to varnish-announce, Per Buer has been very active converting and writing documentation for our new "Sphinx" powered tree, take a look: http://varnish-cache.org/docs/ As always, were are more than happy to receive contributions. If you spot a mistake, thinks something could be explained better or have a great example to contribute: Drop Per an email, he is our "doc-stuckee" for now. My own random outbursts from the machine room also end up in the sphinx three, and when I get stuck on a remote island I will find the old ones and convert as well: http://varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/index.html 1. Varnish 2.1.4 ---------------- Tollef is gearing up towards a 2.1.4 minor release with the recent bugfixes, probably late september or so. Nothing earth-shattering, just making sure we have the best release out there we can. 2. Varnish 3.0 -------------- This is what I am working on mostly. The lastest addition is VCL expressions and modules, which makes VCL able to express things we could not before, allows C language extensions to be encapsulated sensibly: import std sub vcl_recv { if (req.grace > 25 m * 1.25) { set req.http.host = std.tolower(req.http.host); } } There are many i's to dot and t's to cross in this code as it effectively opens up an entirely new API to Varnish and it is obviously not finished yet, but anybody contemplating writing modules are encouraged to check out the work in progress in -trunk (lib/libvmod_std) and get in touch with me, as I would love to have a couple of useful standard modules shipping with 3.0 (GeoIP anyone ?) Varnish 3.0 will change a lot of stuff, and will suffer a number of major renamings, to get terminology aligned with reality. The "purges" we know today will become "bans", and the experimental "nuke" will become "purge" and so on. I still don't have a complete list, but I'm taking the chance to get a lot of things that we got "almost right" in v1 and v2 set firmly right in v3. A realistisc release date is somewhere this winter, probably early in 2011, as my autumn calendar is pretty messed up already. 3. Varnish User Group Meeting 3 ------------------------------- We should start thinking about this one. Realistically we are probably talking january/february 2011, which just might coincide with the 3.0 release, who knows ? As always we prefer somewhere near a well connected airport, not too far away from everybody. (Yes, I know Wellington is nice in January, and I'd really love to see New Zealand but...) We probably need to start looking for larger venues than "some random meeting-room" as we will probably soon see 40-50 people at these events soon. I would really like to avoid the "full-scale hosted-event at some hotel" if we can, they are horribly expensive and seldom brings any advantages for the money. A small auditorium or a large classroom at some educational institution, a bunch of pizzas and soft drinks for lunch is much more my style and price range. But as always, the person doing the job gets to call the shots, and we still don't know who that person is: Volunteer VUG3 arranger sought, apply by email. 4. New developers ----------------- Varnish Software have hired two new developers, Martin & Yves who will gradually start to get involved. I belive that Yves is mostly going to work on the Varnish Software's additional products, (management console etc) whereas Martin will be working more on core code stuff. He is already starting to pick up some of the bug reports during our monday afternoon "bug-wash". 5. Other Events --------------- I just debuted a new Varnish presentation at DrupalCon2010CPH this past week, and it got a nice and/or polite reception there, I will be polishing it a bit and next outing will be: T3CON10 at Frankfurt Oct 1-2. I will also be with my old crew at EuroBSDcon in Karlsruhe Oct 8-10. 6. Varnish Moral License ------------------------ I got a little ahead of the license payments in spring, and I took some time of in July to get back on track, but so far this is working out great and paying for a lot of bugfixing and development. There is room for up to about EUR2000/month more work, if somebody wants to buy a VML for it: http://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/ And of course my Amazon wish-list is also a good way to show appreciation: http://www.amazon.com/registry/wishlist/1XSZNDWXKIAS0 7. Some Thanks are in order --------------------------- One of the things that in my mind characterizes a sound and thriving open source project is the participation. We see more and more good bugreports and the usual gang in our IRC channel and om varnish-misc is doing a great job of helping new users with their questions. Therefore a big THANKYOU from here to all who lend Varnish a hand, it is much appreciated. 'till next time, 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.