If you are running a third-party distribution of Apache (such as one installed via apt-get, or emerge, or ports, or rpm, or whatever else) it would be a great help to me (for a talk I’m working on) if you could send me a tarball of your configuration directory. Primarily, I’m looking for unmodified, or almost-unmodified, default configurations for the major OS distributions out there, in an attempt to:

1) compare them to the default config as shipped from httpd.apache.org
2) identify confusing configuration defaults which are the source of a huge percentage of the problems reported on #apache
3) identify things in the config files which are incorrect, insecure, or just stupid defaults
4) identify neat ideas that have been put into these configs which we could incorporate back into the official configuration files.

So, if you could oblige me, I would be enormously greatful. That’s rbowen AT rcbowen DOT com.

On a related note, we started up a mailing list a few months ago – packagers@httpd.apache.org – and, so far, my invitations for various package managers to join it has been met with deafening silence. The goal of the mailing list is to discuss the default configurations of popular third-party distributions of Apache, as well as to notify these package managers of important new things that have been done to the “official” release, which they might want to take advantage of.

Many of these third-party distributions, in turn, have really good ideas, that we’d like to discuss with them, and potentially incorporate back into the official release.

I’m a little perplexed why the package managers don’t want to be part of that conversation. I would have thought that it would be of great benefit to their users. Perhaps, if any of you are package managers, or know package managers, you could encourage one another to join this conversation. I know that it would at least be of great benefit to me.