The dev team has gotten some new members recently that you might not know of. Here’s a heads up (in alphabetical order):

• hoffie
• icy
• nitrox
• stbuehler

If you hang out in #lighttpd, you will already know these names.

That being said, there is also some news about the state of the development of lighty.

Lighty is a great webserver and we all love it. But if you use it for quite some time, you’ll eventually find out that it’s not perfect. There are some oddities and shortcomings that cannot be ironed out without rewriting a significant part of the core.

This is where I had the idea to start all over.
With lessons learned from the past, we could write a new version of lighty that fixes the design issues the current versions have. But at the same time keep all the good stuff and remain fairly compatible.
The main idea to be fast and lightweight is still valid and if you are familiar with 1.4.x or 1.5, you will have no problems with the new version.

Jan had the idea to use glib for stuff like strings/buffers and arrays. He wanted to rewrite the corresponding parts and did so in a branch of his.
I proposed to take this even further and use glib throughout the source. It makes coding easier, faster and in the end more secure because you can rely on proven and well tested source.

stbuehler jumped in and created a new branch where he started to hack on an all new lighty using the ideas from above. The following days we discussed a lot – and still do so – about the new design. What we could do better, what shortcomings we wanted to fix.

The result is nothing less but a more flexible and faster design for lighty.

This sounds awesome but where is the catch you might think.
Well, currently we have not too much code ready but we are actively hacking on it. Do not ask when it will be released, there is no estimated date. We are still at the very beginning of the new version but hope to have it some day become the official Lighttpd 2.0

We created a page that lists some of the (technical) plans we currently have. You might find some of them interesting.

This is it for today folks. Hope you like the route we are taking and maybe drop us a line in #lighttpd or in the comments.

- update -

To make it clear: 1.5 or 1..4 have not been dropped. If you think 1.5 is unstable and you get a segfault or something like that, then tell us. File a ticket, attach a stacktrace and document the problem in a detailed way so it can be fixed. Thanks for using lighty.