Varnish Status & happy MMX

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

Happy New Year to all Varnish users!

I know a lot of you have a lot riding on Varnish, and having been
in the far end of the food-chain for many years myself, I know that
it's nice to be able to plan ahead a bit, so this email is sort of
a heads-up for you guys.

Releases:
---------
I have a couple of significant, not backwards compatible, VCL changes
I want to get in before we branch a 3.x, and hopefully this will
be done "Real Soon Now" so 3.0.0 can be released in Q1.

2.x may have a release or two in it more, but it will probably not
receive too many new features once 3.x is out.

Varnish is a pretty small project, man-power wise, and keeping more
than one branch and the trunk alive, is presently beyond our means.
We will of course patch any security holes found in 2.x, but that
is probably the extent of our warranty.

VUG-meeting:
------------
We had a good one in London, and I think our Dutch allies plan to
invite us to Amsterdam at some point in 2010, but I do not know the
details.

VML:
----
The "Varnish Moral License" (http://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/) is taking
off, and that will allow me to spend more quality time with Varnish
in the coming months.

I want to thank the Varnish Users who stepped up to the plate:
Varnish is Open Source Software, and free to download, but in
the end nothing comes from nothing, but my kids eat food too.

I also want to thank the people who sent me X-mas gifts from
my Amazon wishlist:  Much appreciated guys!

The "VML" time will be used for what I call "generally puttering
around": adding features, improving things and fixing bugs and
inconveniences.

We have some features high on the collective wishlist, and I will
generally aim for them, but sometimes a detour results in a better
long term result, than applying a bulldozer would do, so apologies
in advance, if I seem to wander aimlessly around:  I probably have
a plan for it.  (I won't get technical in this email, keep an eye
on the varnish-misc mailing list for that stuff).

Bug-Reports:
------------
We need to get better at dealing with the bug-reports you guys
send in.

We will try to do a ticket-review once per week and get you guys
prompt responses.  On the other hand, I will ruthlessly close any
ticket with insufficient data or lack of feedback from the originator.
In such cases, feel free to reopen the ticket with more information.

Also, please don't get offended if I close your ticket because it
is a feature request:  I prefer to move those to the "Shopping
list", to keep the bugs from drowning in good ideas.

Wiki, Trac  & Docs:
-------------------

We are short-handed on the documentation side but I will try to put
in more of an effort.  Somebody[tm] should really write a Varnish
book (You know who You are! :-)

We are happy to hand out wiki-write bits to anyone who asks, and
your help with improving the wiki and documentation is much
appreciated.  (The only reason we don't give all new Trac-users a
wiki-write bit automatically, is to keep trac-spammers away.)


I will conclude with the admonition found at the bottom of many
restaurants menus:

	If you like Varnish, tell your friends.
	If you do not, tell us.

Happy 2010!

Poul-Henning

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.