At work we only use open source software to create our solutions, and to run our hosting or these solutions. Amongst others we use Apache HTTPd, PostgreSQL and of course Debian GNU/Linux and I really love working with them. Now those I’ve just listed are quite mature projects and have a really large userbase. Apache in itself ofcouse is the de-facto HTTPd for any unix server, and it does it’s job incredibly well.

We also use a coule of unmature projects (in the term of lifespan, not stability), and amongst them are Varnish. In case you don’t know, varnish is a really, really high performance reverse proxy. It’s designed by the lovely red bearded man called Poul-Henning Kamp who is also a long time FreeBSD kernel comitter, which should say something about the quality of the code he writes.

To be quite honest, I don’t like the fact that Varnish has not made a release or a statement about it’s progress for almost 8 months. It should’nt be so hard, they have a trac, and some old readmap’s that are fairly outdated. Looking at the timeline of the trac tells us that there indeed is activity, but it does not tell us anything about the current status of the project.

The same almost goes for lighttpd, but they have gotten a bit better at communicating their status. It even seems they are planning to do a rewrite from the ground up in lighttpd 2.0.

What I’d really like to have varnish and the various other projects do, is keep an updated trac. I really fail to see how this whould not do both the projects and the community some real good. And for varnish, I’m inclined to do it myself should I be given permission and knowledge to do so.