Hitting the duck

It’s been 2 busy days. I didn’t really expected to receive any response on my previous post about Rapache and that was cool. Some of the received suggestion have been  already implemented, so, if you’re still interested in Rapache, pull it from stage0 branch and check it out.

Shhht! Don’t tell anyone, the secret command to get the code is:

bzr branch lp:~rapache-devel/rapache/rapache-stage0

Some people asked how to help.

Well, the first way to help is to open new bugs (even for feature requests, just open a bug and explain your idea). You can do it at https://launchpad.net/rapache .

The second way is actually… to solve bugs, or indicate a way to solve them. I’ve tagged a bunch of them as ‘need-help’. You cand find them here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/rapache/+bugs?field.tag=need-help. For this kind of bugs, we don’t need a full patch, you can just send a proof of concept indicating how to solve the bug. That would save us a nice amount of googling .

I forgot to say: thank you thank you thank you.

Thank you thank you thanks to you all for having told me that rapache gui sucked. Shame on you . I tried to re-organize the main window at the best of my skills. We also had to wake up Luana and ask her to revamp our application icon.

Here is the result of all the effort:

As you can see Rapache can now take care of vhost definitions only present into /etc/apache2/sites-enabled and not present inside sites-available (the correct way would be to create the vhost configuration file inside sites-available and then link to it from sites-enabled in order to enabling it).

How do Rapache and Ubuntu relate ?

My very first aim with Rapache was to help webdev beginners and webdesigner (oh, they hate configuration files so much) to quickly be able to handle apache in the correct way. Giving support in ubuntu irc support channels I noticed many people came there asking how to set up apache and, even easy as it is creating a new virtual host, helping them required a lot of time each.

As for now, the primary goal of apache is to get in a decent shape soon enough to be proposed for Intrepid universe repositories. In order to be able to accomplish such goal, we should focus on a realistic set of features and test them enough to make everything working smoothly. It’s of course better a small working program than a big buggy ball of mud.

That said: which features do you think we still miss in order to make sense for a repo inclusion ? Would you open some bug in launchpad and tell us about what we need to do ? Help us hit the duck .

Come say “hello!”

Last post I forgot to tell we have an irc channel on freenode. Feel free to drop in #rapache to greet us and talk to us.

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