a post-VUG2 sort of report

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

First A big thanks to Marco Walraven and eBay/Marktplaats.nl for
hosting the VUG2 meeting, that was absolute wonderful and worked
out great.

Second, an equally big thank to all the participants: I really hope
you get as much out of these meetings as I do, they are supposed
to be meetings for the users, I just sneak in there, even though I
don't run varnish myself.

Third, who and were will VUG3 happen ?   We had no offers at the
VUG2 meeting, but a lot of people seemed to think Island would be
a great place, although I suspect people just want to see a volcano
or buy their own bank or something :-)

I think Anders Berg promised to send a sort of official VUG2
summary out, and quite possibly he did and it is stuck in my
mailbox and I havn't spotted it yet, but I thought I owed
you a report from the development side, so you sort of know
what to expect now.

As some of you heard me mumble, I got an idea in the train down to
Amsterdam, and it transpires that it was a pretty interesting one.
It will probably not improve Varnish performance too much, but it
has allowed me to fulfill a old-ish promise to ACM Queue to write
an article, where I get to plug Varnish etc.  More on that when it
is published.

I have started picking up various low hanging fruit from my VUG2
notes, and already have the VCL compiler taken apart on the operating
table, in my secret basement development laboratories, all the
screws and springs spread out over the place and the secret blue
smoke safely stored in a jar.  I think I may be able to put it
together in a smarter way etc. etc.

I have a confession to make: currently I have 177 varnish related
emails stuck in my inbox, and that just doesn't work for any of us.
Varnish has too many users now, for me, with my limited knowledge
about web-content, to be able to keep track of all issues and
questions people raise in email.

I run a two-stage bayesian mail-filter, the first sorts email
into "spam" vs "mail", the second sorts my mail into "inbox"
vs. "maybe not interesting".  Until now, all email with "varnish"
in it hit my inbox, but I will have to start letting some
varnish subjects hit the second box, and trust the community
to help each other out.

Eventually, we may want to add a -questions mailing list, but
I feel that is too early yet.

Please don't be offended if I do not reply to an email, if my answer
is required but not forthcoming, send me a direct email, or
ask me by name in the email, to make sure it makes it into the
right mailbox.


Various random notes, in no particular order:
---------------------------------------------

We have really tightned our trac-ticket processing: we usually go
over the open tickets monday afternoon (feel free to join us in
#varnish-hacking) and the goal is to only have open tickets which
represent bugs that have not yet been fixed.

Ideas, suggestions, requests and wishes should go into our "Shopping
list" on the wiki, from which I will pick as time permits under the
VML.

About the VML: A big thanks to the license holders: during Q1/10 217
hours of varnish work pretty much caused 2.1.0 to be our best release
ever.  (You can follow the bookkeeping here: http://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/)

And now, back to work...

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.