Perlbal-1.3, coming soon....

[Brad Fitzpatrick]

Perbal lurkers,

If you've been watching cvs, you've probably noticed a flurry of activity
lately on Perlbal.

I'd planned to release Perlbal 1.3 today but didn't get around to it, and
I'll be out of town this weekend.  Unless the hotel has net access, I'll
release it next week.

Full list of upcoming changes since 1.2:

   http://cvs.danga.com/browse.cgi/wcmtools/perlbal/CHANGES?rev=1.52

The highlights:

    -- lots of dependencies now optional (Net::Netmask, Linux::AIO, ...)

    -- service selector framework.  (virtual hosts support included
       as one possible plugin, but many options possible...)

    -- much improved/comprehensive docs

    -- ever-growing test suite

    -- byte range support for both webserver mode and reproxy-file mode
       Giao Phan <giao at guba.com>.  so clients can resume large transfers.

    -- AIO abstraction layer (Perlbal::AIO) which can currently do either
       Linux::AIO or "none" (doing everything sync).

    -- IO::AIO support ... like Linux::AIO, but portable to any OS
       with pthreads

    -- add buffer_backend_connect to do in memory buffering of data before we
       request a backend; assists slow clients without tying up a mod_perl

    -- fix spinning issue when webnodes unavailable; should now not consume 100%
       CPU in those cases

    -- revamp verbose functionality; by default it's still of, but if you specify
       VERBOSE ON in the config file, it turns it on for management connections
       by default.  management connections, when specifying VERBOSE ON/OFF, will
       now set the flag only for that connection.

    -- add pools; a way of having different sets of nodes and instantly switching
       between them, so traffic stops going to old nodes; see the example config
       file for usage

    -- code cleanups

Please check out cvs http://cvs.danga.com/ and checkout
wcmtools/perlbal/ and let me know any thoughts/bugs before we do a
release.

This upcoming release will be in CPAN and also probably Debian.  Help
packaging it for other distros would be appreciated.  Please contact
me for packaging advise, but in a nutshell, we'd need:

   libperlbal-perl     -- all the Perlbal/*
   perlbal             -- tiny file that depends on libperlbal-perl
   libio-aio-perl      -- optional IO::AIO module for async disk io

Then in the fugure mogilefs-server depends on libperlbal-perl.  (so
basically don't combine libperlbal-perl and perlbal into one package)

After 1.3 we have a shitload more coming.  More on that later.

- Brad