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Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork

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Re: Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork

#131
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Maxim did not want CVEs assigned.

Why wouldn't he want CVEs assigned?

>The most recent "security advisory" was released despite the fact that the particular bug in the experimental HTTP/3 code is expected to be fixed as a normal bug as per the existing security policy, and all the developers, including me, agree on this.

>And, while the particular action isn't exactly very bad, the approach in general is quite problematic.

Re: Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork

#132
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> features that look remarkably similar to Nginx Plus features (e.g., the console) Its illegal for products in the same space to have similar features?

Please compare the two and let us know if you think "similar" is the right word.

[deleted]

Re: Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork

#133
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main problem with it is that everybody provides example configurations in the nginx config format, so I have to read them, understand them, and translate them. This is so real. I call it "doc-lock" or documentation lock-in. I don't really know a good scalable way to solve this faster than the natural passage of time and growth of the Caddy project.

LLMs baby! Input nginx config, output caddy config. Input nginx docs, output caddy docs. Someone get on this and go to YC.

LLMs do a horrendous job with Caddy config as it stands. It doesn't know how to differentiate Caddy v0/1 config from v2 config, so it hallucinates all kinds of completely invalid config. We've seen an uptick of people coming for support on the forums with configs that don't make any sense.

Re: Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork

#135
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> features that look remarkably similar to Nginx Plus features (e.g., the console) Its illegal for products in the same space to have similar features?

Please compare the two and let us know if you think "similar" is the right word.

Compare what? Console/dashboard is open sourced by F5, so anybody can fork: https://github.com/nginxinc/nginx-plus-dashboard

Re: Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork

#136
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main problem with it is that everybody provides example configurations in the nginx config format, so I have to read them, understand them, and translate them. This is so real. I call it "doc-lock" or documentation lock-in. I don't really know a good scalable way to solve this faster than the natural passage of time and growth of the Caddy project.

LLMs baby! Input nginx config, output caddy config. Input nginx docs, output caddy docs. Someone get on this and go to YC.

You're absolutely right. I'm going to do this today.

It's clear from this thread that a) Nginx open source will not proceed at its previous pace, b) the forks are for Russia and not for western companies, and c) Caddy seems like absolutely the most sane and responsive place to move.

Re: Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork

#137
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Maxim did not want CVEs assigned.

Why wouldn't he want CVEs assigned?

I haven't read the content of the patches to understand the impact of the bugs, but from my own experience [0] I can suggest a few reasons:

- CVEs are gold to researchers and organizations like citations are to academics. In this case, the CVEs were filed based on "policy" but it's unclear if they are just adding noise to the DB.

- The severity of the bug is not as severe as greater powers-that-be would like to think (again, they see it as doing due diligence; developers who know the ins and outs might see it as an overreaction).

- Bug is in an experimental feature.

I'm not saying one way is right or not in this case, just pointing out my experience has generally been that CVEs are kind of broken in general...

[0]: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/4775

Re: Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork

#138

It is scary to think about how much of web relies on projects maintained by 1 or 2 people.

It's not that scary. If a project everyone depends on is broken and unmaintained, someone else will manufacture a replacement fairly quickly and people will vote with their feet. NGINX is the de facto standard today, but I can remember running servers off apache when I began professionally programming. I remember writing basic cross-broweser spas with script.aculous, and prototypejs in 2005, before bundlers and react…

I still deploy Apache httpd, because that’s what I know best, and it works.

Re: Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Maxim did not want CVEs assigned.

[flagged]

> Nothing suspicious about that at ALL no sir nothing to see here.

Yes, very suspicious that he didn't want to issue CVEs for

checks notes

Two DOS attacks that only apply to users that explicitly enabled experimental QUIC support (by default it's disabled)

Re: Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork

#140
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that scary when you remember there are some systems that haven't been significantly updated for decades (e.g. the Linux TTY interface). A lot of stuff can just coast indefinitely, you'll get quirks but people will find workarounds. Also this is kind of why everything is ever so slightly broken, IMHO.

> Also this is kind of why everything is ever so slightly broken, IMHO. OTOH, things that update too often seem to be more than slightly broken on an ongoing basis, due to ill-advised design changes, new bugs and regressions, etc.

I am thinking with things that don't update often, we just get used to the broken parts. People learned to save every five minutes in Maya since the app crashes so often, for example. Every now and then, a PuTTY session will fill the screen with "PuTTYPuTTYPuTTYPuTTYPuTTY[...]" but it's been that way for at least 20 years, so it's not that remarkable.
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