Re: [squid-users] Squid-2, Squid-3, roadmap

On Wed, 2008-02-27 at 14:30 +1100, Mark Nottingham wrote:

> Specifically, a few questions for the developers of Squid:
> ...

The following is the response from 5 out of 7 Squid Core members. This
is not an official response from Squid Core, the group steering the
Squid Project as a whole.

> anecdotal evidence shows that [Squid3 is] still too unstable and
> slow for production use where these aspects are important;
> or at least, there is enough doubt about them to make switching
> too risky for too little benefit.

We have evidence of Squid3 being stable and fast enough in some
environments where these aspects are important but we agree that Squid2
is more stable and faster in some environments. The Core plans to make a
Squid performance archive to publish performance evidence for public
use.

The Core recommends that users test before deploying and use the version
that works best for them. Today, that version could be Squid2 or Squid3.
More on that below.

> I know that there's a lot of water under the bridge WRT -2 vs -3, and
> don't want to stir up what must seem like a very old discussion to the
> developers. However, there's not much clarity about the situation WRT 2
> vs 3, and we've been in this state for a long period of time.

You are asking valid questions, even though you phrase them in a rather
biased way. Most of these questions have troubled Core for a while as
well. There is currently an active process within Core to find a unified
answer to these questions. We have not succeeded yet, unfortunately.
What you see is an unofficial response that tries to reflect all current
points of view.

We have rephrased the questions to remove the bias that would make
providing correct answers difficult.

* What are user-visible differences between Squid2 and Squid3?

Squid2 users benefit from a longer history of stable releases and a
recent focus on performance optimizations targeting reverse proxy
environments. Squid2 has a few features not ported to Squid3. Features
are ported based on user demand and contributions.

Squid3 users benefit from several major new features and more developers
actively working on Squid3. The unfortunate period of Squid3 stagnation
is over, with many active projects targeting new features, robustness,
performance, code, and documentation improvements.

Users should pick the version that works best in their environment. If
Squid2 and Squid3 work equally well, Squid3 should be used to reduce
upgrade burden in the future.

* When will maintenance on Squid2 stop?

There is currently no timeline for stopping Squid2 maintenance.

* Until that time, what is the development roadmap for Squid2?

There is an agreement that Squid2 will not experience any major changes
or rewrites in the foreseeable future. Existing patches and new
sponsored features will continue to be committed. There is no clear
definition of what a "major" change or "rewrite" is, but sponsors should
know that the bigger the Squid2-only change they sponsor, the more
developer feathers they rough. This agreement has been reached just a
few days ago and the wiki Roadmap may not reflect it yet.

Hope this clarifies,

Amos Jeffries,
Henrik Nordstrom,
Alex Rousskov,
Guido Serassio,
Duane Wessels.
Received on Thu Mar 06 2008 - 23:24:14 MST