apache 1.3.26?

[Christopher Murtagh]

On Mon, 24 Jun 2002, Graham Leggett wrote:
>A good system for be self documented. Seperately maintained
>documentation usually doesn't get maintained, or it simply gets lost
>(from experience).

 This is fine for a trivial setup. When you run an enterprise system that
has to communicate/interact with different departments/groups,
documentation is necessary. We have learned this the hard way, and now
everything that is done is documented and it makes life much easier.

>I used to compile Apache from source on the installations I was
>responsible for. It was a hugely timeconsuming process, and prone to
>mistakes. RPMs have turned out to be a better way.

 If you are having problems making mistakes often, then perhaps your
documentation and/or script writing needs some work. I have more problems
sorting out RPM dependencies than I ever had compiling from source.
Recently, I had to update OpenSSH on a RedHat box that I didn't setup, and
tried via RPMs, but got stuck in a circular dependency and a glibc version
problem. The simple solution, grab source, compile and voila.

>I don't personally believe "doing it that way for decades" is a valid
>reason for adopting a methodology.

 My point was that these geeks have been working in large system
environments for decades and have amassed a lot of experience. These folks
often don't take kindly to RPMs.

>Making your own changes is all well and good, but if you don't pass your
>changes back to the main project you a) create work for yourself down
>the line and b) deny others access to the same work.

 Did you skip the paragraph where I said that I had submitted these
changes back? And that it was a common 'hack' that people had done, enough
so that it is in their FAQ. Also, often the change that you might need for
this a particular situation might not be useful/necessary for anything
else. This is especially true when you work in a mixed environment (like
ours) where you have to deal with all sorts of hardware/software and
homegrown legacy stuff. I'm sure the rest of the world could care less
about some of the crap that we have to integrate with.

>>  Document, document, document.
>
>Lovely in theory, useless in practice. Documentation separate from the
>installation is extra work which in most cases can be avoided, and
>should be avoided seeing most of the time this documentation isn't
>maintained in practice anyway.

 Lovely in theory, essential in practice. Programmers/geeks/sysadmins who
don't keep track/document of what they do, especially on a custom system
that several people work on, should be fired.

Cheers,

Chris


-- 

Christopher Murtagh
Webmaster / Sysadmin
Web Communications Group
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec
Canada

Tel.: (514) 398-3122
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