| Hi guys, I'm responsible for the Tengine project. We're very excited to see the news of Tengine appears on ycombinator. Just a few clarifications: Q: Why Tengine is 'forking' Nginx instead of committing the patches to the official Nginx? A: First, we are developing our own Nginx version because we have strong requirements to enhance it. Our website is very busy (ranked #14 on Alexa's top sites list) and many features we need can't be done by writing modules.
We would love to contribute our work to the official Nginx. We consider it as a great honor to share our achievements with the community. That's why we have open sourced it. We are also trying our best to contribute back to Nginx. Actually we have contacted the core members of the Nginx team last December, including Andrew Alexeev, the people in charge of their Business Development and their COO/GM, Maxim Konovalov. We asked how to collaborate with them. Their replied as following: "It's interesting what you guys do and let's keep in touch. I'm not really quite sure right away in regards to what can be imported to the main branch, but hopefully we'll find things to collaborate on. We're a bit busy towards the end of the year, so probably a good idea to catch up in January." More than two months have passed. We are still waiting for their requests. We are very confused because we don't know which features and bug fixes they think should be merged into Nginx. Some feature such as the syslog and pipe support are explicitly refused to implement; A 'bug fix' of the error_page directive I wanted to send to the Nginx developer but they thought that behavior was OK though many users think it's a bug... Frankly, we are a little bit frustrated. It's very sad that we haven't done too much things together yet. But the Tengine team are open to hear the ideas from the Nginx guys. And we're going to knock their door again. Q: "input filters" in Tengine have anything to do with Chinese requirements for censoring? A: No. It's just a mechanism to help implement something similar to Apache's mod_security. E.g. I have written a module to demonstrate how to fight the hash collision DoS attack:
http://blog.zhuzhaoyuan.com/2012/01/a-mechanism-to-help-writ...
BTW, please don't connect everything to censoring so rashly. The idea of 'people in China are willing to do censoring' is also stupid. |
Also, agreed on people not assuming the worst based on features.