Varnish Cache 2012 project status report

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

I'll try to keep it short as usual:


1. VUG-VUG-VUG:
---------------

I don't know about you, but I had a great time at VUG6 in London.

A big thankyou! to BBC for sponsoring and to Ruben & Hilde from
Varnish Software for arranging it.

VUG7 is currently targeted at "somewhere in North America in Q2",
I'm sure Ruben & Hilde would love your input:

   https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/VUG7


2. Poul-Henning in New Zealand / MultiCoreWorld 2013
----------------------------------------------------

I have been invited to give a talk about Varnish at MW2013 in
Wellington, feb. 19-20, and will sight-see NZ the rest of the
month.

MW2013 (http://multicoreworld.com/) looks pretty interesting btw,
do consider attending.

The travel plan looks roughly like this:
	18th arrive Wellington
	19+20th MW2013
	20th Wellington -> Rotorua
	22th Roturua -> Tangariro(*)
	24th Tangariro -> Christchurch
	 1st depart Christchurch

(*) I have this old ring I need to dispose of.  If this joke does
not make any sense for you, Google is your friend.

If there are any active varnish'ers in NZ who wants to arrange for a
social event along that path, please get in touch.


3. We do still make releases in Varnish, right ?
------------------------------------------------

Erh...Yes, that's certainly the idea.

But for a ton of individually not really very good reasons, that
hasn't happened recently.  We're determined to end the drought Real
Soon Now.

A number of the things we have changed in -trunk means there will
be VCL changes in the next release, and since we don't want to do
that too often, we're trying very hard to make sure we do it right.


4. But you have been slacking, havn't you ?
-------------------------------------------

Not really, but a project to design the real-time computer for the
primary adaptive optics of ESO's ELT telescope (can you say "cool
geek project" ?   I knew you could!) took a wee bit more of my time
than expected, and an unexpected real-estate deal took some time
out of my calendar too.

But now things are settling down, I'm in a new financial year and
my aim is to use up to 50% of my time on Varnish from now on.


5. HTTP/2.0
-----------

The IETF is working towards HTTP/2.0 and since the basis for that
is SPDY, and it will take herkulean efforts to make anything good
come out of that.

If you have the time, you may want to keep an eye on the "HTTPbis"
effort, or even participate, to push for a better direction.

But even if HTTP/2.0 comes out crap, Varnish will have to be able
to do a sensible job at it, one way or another.  This is where a
lot of my Varnish time has been spent the last half year: Varnish
was originally designed to be firmly HTTP/1.1 only, and making it
multiprotocol is non-trivial.


6. Project tools
----------------

We, really: Tollef, have setup a "patchwork" instance, which will
capture any patch on our -dev mailing list, so that we do not loose
track of them any more:
   https://www.varnish-cache.org/patchwork/project/varnish-cache/list/

And for good measure, he also moved us from "tinderbox" to "jenkins"
which provides us with a nice real-time view of what platforms we
have broken etc:
   http://jenkins.varnish-cache.org/

And as usual, we try to go over new tickets every monday to find
out what we do about them, and we hang out on IRC while we work.


7. Funding
----------

As long as companies also pay the invoices they have asked me to
send to them, I should have plenty of time to hack Varnish:

	http://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/index.html

Another simpler way to keep me happy is to buy me stuff from my
Amazon Wish-list:

	https://www.amazon.com/registry/wishlist/1XSZNDWXKIAS0

And with that,

Happy New Year,

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.