[Savannah-hackers-public] Re: *.nongnu.org

[Justin Baugh]

Sylvain Beucler wrote:
> Justin,
> 
> 
> Maybe we can switch to a regenerated set of <VirtualHost>s. Since
> Apache can be told to reload the configuration without closing
> existing connections, I don't think that would impact the
> service. I'll try to make some tests about reloading 2400 virtual
> hosts.

Either we can do this, or I simply separate the configuration for
rewrites and non-gnu is regenerated separately into a different
configuration that is loaded from the *.nongnu vhost. I rewrote the
configuration yesterday to use a completely separate vhost container for
all the *.nongnu hosts, using mod_vhost_alias to change the document
root. I'd rather try that first.

> Symlinks could be created at 'cvs update' time as well, reducing the
> complexity of the rewrite rules.

What would be ideal is to have the rewrite rules in one vhost only. If
we do regenerate n vhosts, put the rewrite rules that apply in that host
only. At the moment the vhost rules are loaded using AccessConfig in the
main configuration, and it is applied across all vhosts. The
interactions that generally occur between conflicting sets are arcane
and undesirable.

The entire reason .symlinks exists is to not actually create symbolic
links of any kind (for obvious reasons), so I think the goal should not
be to create actual symbolic links, but to reduce the rewrite chaos.
This is what I will start doing on Monday. If I am not successful then I
believe we should go the separate vhost per project route.

> Out of curiosity, could you tell me why only 'cvs' caused troubles?

cvs has a symlink for its index page. As I said, only about 40 projects
do this (have something.html and then index.html symlinked to that); I
think cvs is by far the largest and most active of the projects that use
this method.

-Justin