Apache Digest

[Mark J Cox <ma...@ukweb.com>]

I've been a member of this list (although with my last job, the Bradford
Robotic Telescope) since last March.  The volume of messages on this list
recently make it easy to get swamped after taking off just a weekend. 
I've talked to people with only a limited interest in the development of
Apache who would love to follow the list if it was only a little less
busy. 

A while ago I thought it would be really useful to have a weekly summary
of the discussion and the main points that occur on this list; in a
similar way to the weekly Java digest (*1).  However I never found the
time to do this. 

The new company I work for, UK Web, have said that they are willing to
support the effort needed to produce such a digest and let it be freely
distributed.  We have put together sample "issues" for the last two weeks
(http://www.ukweb.com/support/apacheweek/) and we will be adding a new
issue every Friday.  Any comments on content and style from this list
would be welcomed.  If it proves useful to other developers we want to
expand it to include Apache discussion from the press and newsgroups as
well as fill in summaries for the weeks since the Apache list was first
formed.  These could also be put on the Apache site. 

UK Web are also starting to provide a full commercial support package for
Apache (http://www.ukweb.com/).  We have recommended the use of the Apache
server on the large number of sites we have worked on in the past.  Many
of our customers however are not happy to switch to using what they class
as "free unsupported software".  From what we can tell we think there are
a large number of people who think this same way.  By providing support
ourselves we can let Apache compete equally with other commercially
supported servers. 

We will of course be feeding back our bug fixes and features that come out
of the support programme. 

Regards,
Mark
Mark Cox, Technical Director, UK Web ------------ http://www.ukweb.com/~mark

*1 http://www.io.org/~mentor/J___Notes.html