[arch-dev-public] Upgrading Apache to 2.4

[Anatol Pomozov]

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.

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.