2 Apache 2.0beta1 Released
3 -------------------------
5 After two long years of development he Apache Group is pleased to announce
6 the release of the first public beta release of Apache 2.0.
8 Apache 2.0 offers numerous enhancements, improvements and performance
9 boosts over the 1.3 codebase. The most visible and noteworthy addition
10 is the ability to run Apache in a hybrid thread/process mode on any
11 platform that supports both threads and processes. This has shown to
12 improve the scalability of the Apache HTTPD server significantly in
13 our early testing, on some versions of Unix. With this version of Apache,
14 we have also added support for filtered I/O. This allows modules to modify
15 the output of other modules before it is sent to the client. This release also
16 greatly improves the performance and robustness of Apache on the
17 Microsoft Windows Operating Systems. This beta includes support for IPv6
18 on all platforms that support IPv6.
20 This version of Apache is known to work on many versions of Unix, BeOS,
21 OS/2, and Windows. Because of many of the advancements in Apache 2.0,
22 the initial release of Apache is expected to perform equally well on all
25 There are new snapshots of the Apache httpd source available every 6
26 hours from http://dev.apache.org/from-cvs/apache-2.0/ - please
27 download and test if you feel brave. We don't guarantee anything
28 except that it will take up disk space, but if you have the time and
29 skills, please give it a spin on your platforms.
31 Apache has been the most popular web server on the Internet since
32 April of 1996. The May 2000 WWW server site survey by Netcraft (see:
33 http://www.netcraft.co.uk/Survey/) found that more web servers were
34 using Apache than any other software running on more than 60% of the
37 For more information, please check out http://www.apache.org/httpd.html
39 Known problems with Apache 2.0b1
41 *) WARNING: Apache 2.0b1 is not expected to run on Windows 95, 98 or ME.
42 The intitial production release of Apache 2.0 is expected to run on
43 these consumer operating systems, but they cannot be recommended as
44 production environments due to the lack of integrated security and
47 *) The canonical paths are being overhauled. This affects especially
48 Win32 users with this release. Due to this transitional state,
49 file with names containing non-ASCII characters may refuse serve.
50 This is in preparation for the next release, users will be able to
51 serve any Unicode named files with Apache/Win32 on Windows NT/2000.
53 *) Win32 users will see no message when Apache 2.0b1 is started as a
54 console. While normal for unix, this differs from the behavior in
55 Apache 1.3 on Windows.
58 Changes with Apache 2.0b1
60 *) Apache is now IPv6-capable. On systems where APR supports IPv6,
61 Apache gets IPv6 listening sockets by default. Additionally, the
62 Listen, NameVirtualHost, and <VirtualHost> directives support IPv6
63 numeric address strings (e.g., "Listen [fe80::1]:8080").
66 *) Modify the install directory layout. Modules are now installed in
67 modules/. Shared libraries should be installed in libraries/, but
68 we don't have any of those on Unix yet. All install directories
69 are modifyable at configure time. [Ryan Bloom]
71 *) Install all header files in the same directory on Unix. [Ryan Bloom]
73 *) Get the functions in server/linked into the server, regardless of
74 which modules linked into the server. This uses the same hack
75 for Apache that we use for APR and apr-util to ensure all of the
76 necessary functions are linked. As a part of thise, the CHARSET_EBCDIC
77 was renamed to AP_CHARSET_EBCDIC for namespace protection, and to make
78 the scripts a bit easier.
81 *) Rework the RFC1413 handling to make it thread-safe, use a timeout
82 on the query, and remove IPv4 dependencies. [Jeff Trawick]
84 *) Get all of the auth modules to the point that they will install and
85 be loadable into the server. Our new build/install mechanism expects
86 that all modules will have a common name format. The auth modules
87 didn't use that format, so we didn't install them properly.
90 *) API routines ap_pgethostbyname() and ap_pduphostent() are no longer
91 available. Use apr_getaddrinfo() instead. [Jeff Trawick]
93 *) Get "NameVirtualHost *" working in 2.0. [Ryan Bloom]
95 *) Return HTTP_RANGE_NOT_SATISFIABLE if the every range requested starts
96 after the end of the response. [Ryan Bloom]
98 *) Get byterange requests working with responses that do not have a
99 content-length. Because of the way byterange requests work, we have to
100 have all of the data before we can actually do the byterange, so we
101 can compute the content-length in the byterange filter.
104 *) Get exe CGI's working again on Windows.
107 *) Get mod_cgid and mod_rewrite to work as DSOs by changing the way
108 they keep track of whether or not their post config hook has been
109 called before. Instead of a static variable (which is replaced when
110 the DSO is loaded a second time), use userdata in the process pool.