Admins are not slow to change. Operations and Corporations are slow. Admins generally have more than one version of any software running. More than you can imagen.

Generally they do have development versions daily updated and built and tested under the hood. Generally they do provide support and feedback to these software by bug reports or even with changesets.

But they are not slow.. most of the time they do work out of your eye sight.

I can bet some admins are trying to see if mod_lua can be a good replacement for the current configuration.

For myself I do not like it to happen. Because most of the deployments of apache are huge and this will break too many things.

And yes, if it's working do not change it :)

(edit: gramer and typo corrections)

As someone who has been an admin (both with and without that job title), I'll say that I was slow to change, and often still am. Why? Because every change is an opportunity for something to go wrong, and in my experience, something goes mildly wrong about half the time, and catastrophically wrong way more often than it should. This is after doing all the testing that can usually be done. Either there's no testing server for this client, or you can't replicate the exact conditions of the change because you don't have another Windows 2003 SBS handy to test interaction with, or you run into lots of issues in the test and can't easily roll back to make sure that you can do it flawlessly this time...

Unless you've got an employer or client that can afford you for an additional 20 hours for each major change, everyone involved just crosses their fingers and holds their breath. I've never been an admin in an environment where there was adequate funding, though, so maybe it's just me.

Anyway, I typically put off upgrades and new installs that affected old servers (new apache modules or whatever) as long as possible.

Edit: this is why I just code, now. It's easier to write stuff that works than to find the magic this-THEN-that incantation to make someone else's stuff work. ;)

Admin work is weird because when everything's working, no one says a peep. No, "hey, great job with that update last night which we were largely unaware of because it all happened seemlessly!". It's only when something goes wrong that anyone says anything.

You are not telling something contrary what I tell. You are not slow to change. Operations are slow. You have some systems and operations on going but a change will drastically impact all the operations. You have changed yourself about the change. You know about it, but you do not know it's effects on the system. So you can't change the system right away.

I bet you tested most of the changes on your own time and on equipment when possible.

For myself I do.

It might be a harsh stereotype, but it has been said that the Apache project is an exercise in bureaucrats doing open source. Alternatively, it's an ideal outlet for bikeshedding.

True, though I think it's probably a very large undertaking for a single person. Bringing it up on the mailing list would be a good way to gain mindshare and contributors.

Open source projects usually fair better with one author until they are somewhat stable, in my experience.

Well, I think that's definitely true in most cases, especially when the direction of a project isn't really nailed down you tend to get a lot of backseat driving and discussions over things that aren't important to the original goals, and people want to make the project about X when it should really be about Y, etc... I guess you need an OSS leader to either lead through strength of character/charisma, or by having already written the bulk of the code, but code trumps everything else so it's better to have written the bulk of the code.

Point being, I think you're right and I think my initial reasoning was wrong. But all the same, a little mailing list discussion generally doesn't hurt.

The way to encourage adoption is just provide new functionality only possible using the new config syntax. Need dynamic process pool control? Here's a Lua example...