In this issue

The commit policy on the stable and unstable branches of the 2.0 CVS tree came under scrutiny this week, after a change was committed to the stable tree without going through the review process. It was clarified that all changes should first be committed to the unstable tree, and receive three supporting votes from reviewers before being back-ported to the stable branch.

Some server administrators on modern Linux platforms may have been encountering difficulties getting a core dump out of an Apache server when trying to track down a segmentation fault. This can be due to a change introduced in the Linux 2.4 kernel which disables core dumps for processes which have changed user id (such as httpd, which changes from the "root" user to some less privileged user). Jeff Trawick has published an Apache 1.3 module, dubbed mod_prctl, which enables core dumps on Linux without needing to recompile Apache. A patch to enable core dumps has also been committed to the Apache 2.0 CVS tree.

In this section we highlight some of the articles on the web that are of interest to Apache users.

"Filters in Apache 2.0" demonstrates how to port Apache::Clean, a content filter written for mod_perl 1.0 using mod_perl 2.0 API for Apache 2.0. It starts off by a basic explanation of what output filters are, how HTML::Clean and Apache::Clean works, and ends with a detailed look at the source code of the new Apache::Clean.

Builder.com shows you how to enable PHP4 support for an Apache 2 web server running on a Microsoft Windows machine. It guides you through the steps of installing binary distributions of Apache 2 and PHP4, editing both configuration files (httpd.conf and php.ini) manually for them to work together, and testing to ensure that your setup works.

The article entitled "Python and Apache" is the result of Peter Laurie making amends for not covering Python in the "Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition" book which he co-authored. Here, he provides a sample Python script that retrieves data from a MySQL database and configures Apache to run the script whenever users access the main website. Unfortunately some of his observations about Python as a newbie didn't go down well with the language's enthusiasts as can be seen from the comments he received.

Time and time again one of the reasons cited for the slow rate of migrating to Apache 2 is a lack of suitable third-party modules. Now a list of third-party modules ported to Apache 2 is available here so do check it out to see if the module you require is available.