In this issue

Apache Site: www.apache.org
Release: 1.3.3 (Released 9^th October 1998) (local download sites)
Beta: None

Apache 1.3.3 is the current stable release. Users of Apache 1.2.6 and earlier should look at upgrading to this version. Read Guide to 1.3.3 for information about changes between 1.2 and 1.3.3.

• Using content negotiation (mod_negotiation), Apache will return the unencoded version of a resource even if an encoded version exists and the client can accept the encoded version (encodings are things like compression with gzip or compress). PR#3447.

Patches for bugs in Apache 1.3.3 will be made available in the apply_to_1.3.3 subdirectory of the patches directory on the Apache site. Some new features and other unofficial patches are available in the 1.3 patches directory. For details of all previously reported bugs, see the Apache bug database and known bugs pages. Many common configuration questions are answered in the Apache FAQ.

The NCSA server supported special case directives to log user-agent and referer details for every request. In Apache, any number of log files can be created, each logging any aspect of the request in any format. This means you can create logs of user agents and referers easily. However the special case referer log in the NCSA server allowed certain referers to be ignored. There is currently some work to add support for the extra NCSA features into the standard Apache logging module. It is not yet clear whether this will make it into a released version of Apache.

Multiple language versions of documents can be served automatically by the negotiation module. Typically documents in different languages would be stored in filenames such as doc.html.en and doc.html.fr. But most sites will already have a lot of content in a particular language, so do not want to rename all the existing files to add a language extension. Currently under development is a way to specify a default language for files which do not have an explicit language extension.