Varnish project autumn cleaning

[Jos Boumans]

> On Nov 3, 2015, at 12:23 AM, Kristian Lyngstol <kly at redpill-linpro.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Nov 02, 2015 at 10:22:30AM -0800, Jos Boumans wrote:
>> What’s the gating factor here for you? Time, cost, expertise?
>> Is there a way the community can help you?
> 
> Who is "you”?

That would be those identifying themselves as ‘we’ in the original
post. Presumably the same great folks who have offered & maintained:

  https://www.varnish-cache.org/installation/debian
  https://www.varnish-cache.org/installation/redhat

See here, for your convenience, and apologies if that caused confusion:

>>>> On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 10:49:32AM +0100, Lasse Karstensen wrote:
>>>>> On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 05:37:58PM +0000, Federico Schwindt wrote:
>>>> [..]
>>>>>> Are we going to continue providing packages?
>>>>> Consensus seem to be no on the package building.

> Lasse's mail is mostly about moving responsibility away from V-S over to
> where it rightfully belongs: With the appropriate distros.

The problem with that is that distros don’t update packages as upstream
releases newer versions. They only release new versions of the OS, or
if needed, security updates. I offer you the below link to substantiate
that claim:

  https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/varnish

This means that incentives between the Varnish team & distros are not
likely to be aligned; if the Varnish project releases a new version,
presumably it would like its userbase to upgrade to that version, as it
has bug fixes, feature enhancements and other changes that made it worth
while enough to release.

Distros will stick to the same major/minor version for the lifetime of
their OS release. Most customers will be on long term support releases
of the OS (for Ubuntu, those happen every 2 years), so in best case,
Varnish users will be using up to 2 year old software, but probably closer
to 3 or 4. That doesn’t seem to be a win for the user base, nor for the
core dev team & community in terms of supporting that older software.

> Building from source is an ops nightmare.
> 
> If your business is centered around Varnish, it might make sense. If
> Varnish is just one of many many tools, then instead of telling people to
> build from source, you might as well just attach the nginx user manual.

We agree, hence my question how the community at large might help the
‘we’ in the original post to keep providing the awesome repositories
of varnish packages.

Any thoughts & constructive criticism much appreciated,

-Jos

—
Entropy isn’t what it used to be...


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