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Vinnie wrote:
> I wish I could be more help with bringing the patch forward into newer
> kernel versions [...]
>
> [...] without some capable programmers getting involved, or the
> maintainers of the IPVS main source code either adopting Antefacto
> directly into the IPVS source, or otherwise bringing communication
> between netfilter connection tracking and IPVS connection state into
> IPVS's capablities - so that an external patch no longer has to be
> applied to accomplish this very sensible functionality in IPVS -
> things don't look good for Antefacto's capabilities to be brought much
> farther forward.
As the original author of the patch, it saddens me to say this, but
Vinnie is absolutely correct. I never received a satisfactory answer to
why the patch was never incorporated into the main LVS code.
It is not a large patch. Excluding comments, assertions, debugging
printk()s etc., it adds about 10 lines of real code to the kernel
itself, and about 50 lines to LVS for the main functionality. FTP
handling adds about another 75 lines.
Also, I tried to explain very carefully exactly what it did and why.
This was the purpose of the README I sent in. So the keeper of the
official code would not have been 'blindly' incorporating a bunch of
random code.
We gave it as much testing as we could at Antefacto, and Vinnie has been
using it successfully. I believe it's a stable piece of code.
It seems there's enough of a demand for this functionality, so I'll ask
the maintainers: why are you reluctant to incorporate this patch into
the main codebase?
What's happening now was inevitable really. I cannot really keep the
patch up-to-date. It's unreasonable to expect Vinnie to take on the
maintainership. For somebody fairly familiar with the codebase, I would
guess it should be less than a day's work to produce a new patch. I
don't have the time or equipment here to set up a development
environment, but I'm happy to answer questions as best I can if somebody
wants to take on the job. If another couple of kernel or LVS releases
go by without updating the code, it'll become much more difficult to do,
and in all probability the functionality will be lost. I think that
would be a shame, not just because I wrote it :-) but because it seems
useful and wanted.
Ben.
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