Re: [squid-users] Re: Cacheboy-1.1 release, testers wanted!

Its reasonably simple, and was documentedin the past.

Cacheboy is a fork of Squid-2.HEAD, with the intent to implement all the
various things which I believed we should have done to Squid-2 before
we forked it off and started along the Squid-3 path.

Some of these medium term goals may conflict with Squid-3 goals and
I didn't want to implement everything inside Squid-2 until the rest
of the developers were happy. These include HTTP/1.1, IPv6 support
and some rudimentary content manipulation.

I began studying Squid performance issues a number of years ago when Squid-3
was still not stable. I chose Squid-2 because its what people were using.
I'd like to think that my Squid-2 focus has and is benefitting users -
I've tried to keep the "leap" between versions (at least due to my changes)
reasonably minimal, but this hasn't always been the case.

Squid-3 is now stable but there is still upcoming work which would make
my performance related stuff more painful to implement, and this would result
in longer periods of instability and release times. Coupled with the fact
that Squid-3 still doesn't run anywhere near the speed that Squid-2.7 does
(and Squid-2.HEAD / Cacheboy will just make that worse, sorry!), I think
that Squid-2 is a perfectly good vehicle to flesh out performance and
flexibility work - people run it everywhere, its used in very busy environments,
and people seem happy to trial a version which is very close to what they're
already running.

As I've said before, its my hope that I can roll the changes I make in
Cacheboy (and eventually Squid-2.HEAD) into a "better" future version of Squid.
But I need to know -what- to change before I can really discuss topics like
parallelism, performance, storage and features; and I don't think that anyone
actively working on Squid right now really knows what the path forward should
be. I got fed up waiting :)

If you noticed, I've aimed to make Cacheboy stable -now-. This is only a few
weeks after Squid-2.7 was released. Assuming Squid-2.HEAD doesn't get any
further changes which introduce regressions, my aim is to get Cacheboy stable
and in production right now so I can push out Squid-2.8, get it into
production environments and begin the next set of changes. I don't want
the release cycle to take years like we have in the past.

Adrian

On Sat, Jun 07, 2008, Linda W wrote:
> Is squid being renamed?
>
> Or what the relation of cacheboy to the squid project?
>
> Or was it the 2.7 branch that was renamed to cacheboy
> (is there one for girls?...not sure a I want a boy caching
> my webcontent -- but thats another matter...:-))
>
> I'm also a bit perturbed, that 3.0, which has been around
> forever, is still in Beta, while alot of work continues to
> go on in the 2.x line. I mean "usually" most work goes toward
> the new generation....with maybe 1 person handing bug fixes
> for 2.x...and usually most feature work goes into 3.x...
>
> I'm not trying to direct or anything, I don't understand all
> the politics or what's going on...
>
> Is cacheboy going to become a 3rd squid proxy server? Or
> why was it split off?
>
> If it's really designed to be a separate fork going off in a
> different direction, I don't suppose it's very high traffic
> at this point, but it seem like it's yet another distractor
> for moving ahead getting all features and performance work
> needed in 3.x I mean -- the linux kernel is alot bigger and
> has a greater diversity of needs than squid would likely ever
> have, yet they, remarkably, have managed to stay mostly cohesive,
> but maybe no one with 'squid' has linus's charismatic charm? (?!?)
>
> But certainly a lesson to be taken from linux, no matter what
> examples there are to it not working for some developers (and there
> have been examples -- nothing is perfect), but the bulk of the
> work is focused and there doesn't seem to be any forks of any
> note, meaning ones that weren't intended as testing/development
> playgrounds with the work being remerged later, sorta faded away.
>
> So I guess, how did cacheboy come to be and why is it here (which
> may become obvious if I know the connection to the 'main' squid
> project...)? :-?

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