Lighttpd

What amount of effort do you think is involved in implementing this?

Good question. Let's see what developers familiar with the code have to say.

With this being a new module that is in development and the documentation says they want feedback, I hope my input helps make this module get it right and be useful for people, but without SSL, having a dynamic database is not very useful for today's requirements when you'd still need to use config files to do SSL.

Let's see what developers familiar with the code have to say.

I am one of the current lighttpd maintainers. I am the developer who wrote mod_vhostdb, as well as the current versions of mod_openssl, mod_mbedtls, mod_gnutls, and mod_nss.

Please re-read what I wrote in #3019:

mod_vhostdb is independent from the TLS modules provided by lighttpd, e.g. mod_openssl.

If your company would like to sponsor development of a backend certificate store and integration with lighttpd, please open a discussion in the Development Forum. See the "Forums" tab at the top of the page.

Your post here makes no mention of my response in #3019 and no mention of an RFP. Why do you think I might have asked: "What amount of effort do you think is involved in implementing this?"

Sounds like you'd be a good person to answer that question. No? It would not make sense for me to answer that question.

Your response, as you quoted, says to open a ticket in this forum if we'd like to sponsor development, and here we are, in this forum, where a discussion was opened.

I'm not so sure why you seem to be annoyed by the request or idea. Maybe it's hard to read someone's writing nd I am misreading it, but you come off as a disgruntled volunteer in response to me and to others in the forum. Please let me know if my impression is incorrect, but if that is the face of this project and the sentiment of the other maintainers here, if any, then it's probably not a project I want to spend resources on as it's likely going to be a let down in the long run where we'd later have to find other solutions from other projects that have an active community or a viable business model. I've supported many open source projects in the past and have no problem doing that here, but it has to feel right to move forward.

I'm not so sure why you seem to be annoyed by the request or idea.

If you re-read your posts, you have confidently made numerous (not very well-informed) statements and have asked a single question -- and a rhetorical one at that: "Sounds like you'd be a good person to answer that question. No?"

I am not interested in spending my time arguing against poorly-informed statements. (Please search your posts for a question mark ('?'))

You might find that politely asking questions is more effective than making wild assumptions and then expecting others to dissuade you. At least for me, I prefer respectful conversations to arguments. I have informed answers, but am not interested in being put in a defensive posture against the uninformed.

You chose to avoid trying to answer my question when asked if you had any estimate of the effort involved. (Hint: it is not trivial.) My tepid response stems from my perception that there is a large gap in your assessment of this project, and that you are expecting a professional such as myself to spend my time educating you, uncompensated.

I think it would be best if you take some time yourself to survey the landscape of open-source and commercial options available to you so that we might have an informed discussion. Your generalized statements "not very useful for today's requirements" might be true for your specific commercial use, but you stating it as a generalized fact is off-putting, not to mention inaccurate (as a generalization) from what I know of various alternative technical solutions.

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You wrote:

With this being a new module that is in development and the documentation says they want feedback, I hope my input helps make this module get it right and be useful for people,

Regarding mod_vhostdb development, your input is a bit late. mod_vhostdb was part of lighttpd 1.4.46, which was released Oct 2017, more than 2 1/2 years ago. There have been 9 releases of lighttpd since then, the latest being lighttpd 1.4.55. Subsequently, I have removed the "experimental" note from the mod_vhostdb documentation page. I appreciate that you read the documentation, but feel that you have drawn some hasty conclusions which I have assessed as being not very well-informed.

Yes, this is not a project I would feel comfortable supporting, so I withdraw my request.

Thanks for making assumptions as to how informed I am about how trivial or not I think this would be to develop, or how much I know about other technical options. You're obviously a good mind reader.

My apologies for also being confused on the development stage mod_vhostdb was in. Since the docs said it was still experimental and the version ended in a 6 like the next version to be released will have, I did not notice it was an older version and was already released.