Lighttpd

Assumptions
As the Lighttpd 1.5.x branch is starting, there are a couple of deficiencies in the development process that should be addressed.

The overall impression of the quality of Lighttpd 1.4.x as a product can vary quite a lot depending on where you're looking. So, seeing Lighttpd in retrospect:

=== Basic design, features, performance ===
There is no denying that "less is more" sometimes, Lighty being one of those cases. The basic design laid out by Jan is ambitious enough to provide a good number of features, yet retaining the "lightweight" overall feel of the program.

• Overall: Good.

=== The code ===
It builds without ''too'' many warnings ;-). The fact that it ''has'' a test framework is just super.

• The tests need to be maintained (maybe assigned/delegated to a specific developer).
• Successfully executing the tests should be a part of the release procedure :-)

=== Documentation ===
We have several up to date tutorials on the wiki, that's great. But for reference?

• Most of the documentation could move from the main web page to the wiki (to enable joint maintenance).

=== Project group ===

• Overall: What persons, other than Jan, are SVN commiters? What other people are accountable, and for what? see DevelopersList

=== TODOs ===
1.5.x is meant to * fix internals which are blocking us from moving forward. * do big changes that can't be done on 1.4.x-stable branch. * merge most if not all duplicated code, which helps a lot on code maintaining/improving

the list below is meant for discussion.

• combine mod_fastcgi, mod_cgi, mod_scgi and mod_proxy into mod_proxy_core
  and protocols around it. They all cut'n'pasted from mod_fastcgi anyway. * the core provides * config handling * connect/retry on failure * fork/restart worker child on dead. (easier to improve native win32 support) * balancing * x-sendfile * the protocol backends take care of * preparing the environment (most cgi env code can be shared) * encode/decode data * handle io
• introduce a new io-subsystem which allows filtering content incoming and
  outgoing data * mod_uploadprogress can track the progress of an upload * mod_deflate can compress content * mod_multiplex can reroute content to other connections * mod_layout can replace tags in the outgoing stream * consider support for asynchronous file io (most likely emulated using threads rather than native aio calls)
• make the core aware of max-workers * combines server-status * synchroniced logfiles * perhaps make it memcache/shm/mmap based for cluster-wide stats
• combine most of config handling into core, including: * alloc/free plugin data * init default values * insert values from config (into plugin data) * patch(pick) values from plugin data for connection.
  this is done by calling a function ptr, but we can kill the string comparisons, lower or higher performance?
• apply %n to other config option.
  (such as document root. users might get confused as to what does or doesn't support %n, but it seems hard to apply all the options.)
• find a way to solve module order problem: * sort the "user enabled module" by the builtin "ordered module list", but 3rd party module have no luck on this way. * or add more "handling stages", and depends on "stage order" instead of "module order". this is a bit too complex. * sparsely assign each module a numeric id and use this to determine loading order. * or ... (and your solution here)