Free software mailing lists suck. Especially Apache’s.
- Many of them have a CRAP Web interface or worse:
- Posting limited to subscribers
For weeks I have been struggling with Apache mailing lists (apache-users and spamassassin) and now recently with mutt lists.
I know with Apache lists you can use a special syntax:
You can start a subscription for an alternate address, for example "john@host.domain", just add a hyphen and your address (with '=' instead of '@') after the command word: <users-subscribe-john=host.domain@httpd.apache.org>
But when I do it via mutt or a `echo test | mail users-unsubscribe-hendry=dabase.com@httpd.apache.org`. I get no response from the automated mailing list manager. 
So, If I ever get subscribed it’s generally thanks to the mailing list owner.
Then after lurking a bit, I try post. That never works as the return paths don’t match the email I am subscribed with. Return paths change all the time depending on which machine I sent it from. It could be anything from:
- hendry@pico.dreamhost.com (from my shell)
- hendry@laptop.dabase.com (from my laptop)
- hendry@soltecsoftware.com.au (from work)
And the first two aren’t working email addresses!
If you must filter, can’t you filter on my From OR Reply-To email address FFS: hendry@iki.fi
All I suggest is for Apache to start using something usable like Google Groups for user support.
Does anyone else feel my frustration?
libapache-mod-jk configuration is radically different to libapache2-mod-jk2.
The sad thing is that that configuration style for libapache-mod-jk is so much better than libapache2-mod-jk2.
Compare:
Which one do you prefer?
Then the VirtualHost in Apache 1.3 was a simple JkMount. Now it’s a completely different JkUriSet.
Insane. Waste of time.
mod_rewrite is a pain to work with. In order to debug you need RewriteLog and if you’re on a shared host you’re probably stuck with evil .htaccess where Rewritelog is:
.htaccess: RewriteLog not allowed here
So what does one do?
While preparing alpha Debian packages for WP 1.6 I looked at the htaccess Wordpress generates. It’s just:
RewriteRule . /index.php
I didn’t know you could do this. This makes it so much easier to de-crufy URLs. I started an interesting thread on Wordpress hackers which details this sane URL rewriting technique.
Here is the code that implements Wordpress URL rewriting in PHP.
I’ve moved my Subversion repositry over to Dreamhost. As that is a shared host I needed to setup Trac via htaccess.
I wrote about this in the Dreamhost Wiki though I still have a problem.
Now I need to get rid of the stupid index.cgi crufting my URL!
http://trac2.natalian.org/index.cgi/browser/projects/ on Dreamhost
Should be same URI structure as my previous host:
http://trac.natalian.org/browser/projects/
I guess I need to do this with RewriteRules from htaccess, but I have never had much luck with them. They’re voodoo. Black magic. I need help.
There should be some resource or group dedicated to solving RewriteRule problems like mine. To de-cruft URLs and maintain a pleasant URL structure.