Re: Introduction

On Mar 11, 2011, at 8:03 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

> I'm the author of the Varnish HTTP accelerator and have just joined
> the mailing list, so I thought it would be proper if I introduced
> myself.

Hi Poul-Henning, it's nice to have you here.

> I know I am going to rub some of you the wrong way when I say this,
> but I decided early on that it would never be a goal of mine to
> make Varnish totally RFC2616 compliant.
> 
> RFC2616 contains a lot of stuff that is never used, some of it is
> even patently useless, but a lot of it is just not used in practice,
> at least not in the application space where Varnish resides.  Those
> bits will not be implemented in Varnish as long as they see no use
> on the internet.
> 
> I have yet to see a Content-MD5 for instance.

No problem.  I did the same thing with 2616 (Apache httpd
implemented 2068 and then I was way too busy trying to get
my dissertation done to pay attention to 2616, sadly).
HTTP has gone through several waves of expansion, as various
experiments were deployed, and then contraction as we figured
out which ones didn't work in practice.

> But for all parts of HTTP which Varnish implements, I strive to be
> compliant with with the standards.

Great.  Is there any chance that you have a list of features
or requirements that you did not implement (on purpose)?

I don't have much opinion on the proposed timeout features,
but I do wish that folks would pick shorter names and make
use of the existing ones (like the options on keep-alive).

....Roy

Received on Friday, 11 March 2011 20:00:02 UTC