Update on vmods and packaging

[Lasse Karstensen]

Hi all.

Varnish Software (VS) is writing and maintaining a fair amount of vmods for
Varnish Cache. This includes major ones like vmod-header, which can be
said to be borderline core Varnish functionality.

We will be doing some changes on how these are maintained and distributed.

Currently the normal way of using them (in the community) is to do a git
checkout from Github, build it from source and run it. This is all very
bleeding edge, and leaves something to be desired.

We (VS) will start doing versioned tarball releases of the vmods.
They will get changelogs, and the tarballs will be made available for
mirroring just as Varnish Cache code is.

This will allow distribution packagers to add the vmod packages on their
platforms. I'm working with the Fedora/EPEL and Debian packagers to get
it in place there.

Additionally we will try to write down what the community can expect
from VS in this regard, to help everyone make informed decisions on what
to run. (on how long)

The tarball releases will be adopted to the current latest Varnish Cache
release. The development version will continue to live on Github, but
will be moved to master branch in each one. Code for 4.0 and 3.0 will be
deprecated.

Implementation of this plan will be gradual over the next months.

Further down the line it is likely that we will be combining the simple
vmods (with no third party/library dependencies) into a single
collection source package. Updates on that will come later.

I'm happy to answer any questions on this, either on-list or privately.

-- 
Lasse Karstensen
Varnish Software
(with VS hat on.)