[arch-dev-public] Upgrading Apache to 2.4

[Anatol Pomozov]

Hi

On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 3:21 PM, Anatol Pomozov
<anatol.pomozov at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 4:43 PM, Anatol Pomozov
> <anatol.pomozov at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> One of my TU application proposals was updating apache package to 2.4.
>> The 2.4 branch exists for 2 years, actively developed and is
>> recommended by upstream. Taking into account that many distros moved
>> to 2.4 already I do not expect serious problems with moving Arch to
>> 2.4.
>>
>> I would like to look at this issue. In addition to version bump I wan
>> to cleanup the PKGBUILD file e.g. "itk" is an apache module now and we
>> do not need to apply a huge pile of patches to apache sources - it can
>> be a separate package 'mod_itk'.
>>
>> So how can I update the apache package? I do not have access to
>> [extra] so I see 2 ways to resolve the issue:
>>
>> 1) Move apache and its dependencies from [extra] to [community]. I
>> update apache and rebuild mod_* packages.
>>
>> 2) I create apache24 and mod_itk modules and after some testing devs
>> will move it to [extra], replace content of 'apache' and rebuild
>> dependencies.
>>
>> What is the preferred solution?
>
> Here is my experience with updating Apache dependencies. I see that
> some popular third-party modules either have no development for years
> or do not want to update Apache2.4 at all.
>
> Following dependencies have no compilation problems with Apache2.4:
> mod_fcgid,mod_dnssd,mod_wsgi and recompilation was easy.

Actually mod_dnssd released in 2009 also does not work with Apache2.4.
There is an unreleased change in the repo that we should pull into our
package.

It means that only minority of third-party modules work with apache2.4
out-of-box :(

>
> There are few other mods in arch repos that took a while for me to
> figure out what to do:
>
> mod_fastcgi: The last release was made in 2007. The official version
> does not compile with Apache2.4. There are third-party patches that
> make it work. Both Debian and Gentoo use this version
> https://github.com/ByteInternet/libapache-mod-fastcgi
>
> mod_perl: 2 years back the developers said they work on Apache2.4
> support but there no any official version with this work yet. Debian
> uses unreleased branch
> http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/perl/modperl/branches/httpd24/
>
> mod_mono: Another ancient mod that does not compile with Apache2.4.
> They have some development in their official repo
> https://github.com/mono/mod_mono but it is not released.
>
> The whole situation with popular third-party Apache modules that do
> not want to migrate to 2-years old release makes me a little bit
> depressed.

Apache2.4 and its modules are in [testing] now. Woo-hoo! Please
install and check it. Hopefully everything will be ok, but if it is
not - report your findings.