In this issue

A maintenance upgrade of Apache is expected soon. This will be called Apache 1.3.1. On Unix, it fixes a few bugs and corrects a number of portability problems on certain platforms. On Win32, it fixes a number of security issues. Note that the security issues do not apply to the Unix version. All users of Apache 1.3.0 on Windows should upgrade immediately to 1.3.1 when it is available. As with 1.3.0 the Windows version of 1.3.1 should be regarded as a beta release.

Apache Site: www.apache.org
Release: 1.3.0 (Released 6^th June 1998) (local download sites)
Beta: None

Apache 1.3.0 is the current stable release. Users of Apache 1.2.6 and earlier should look at upgrading to this version, which provides additional features and has been subject to extensive testing.

The bugs listed below now include a link to the entry in the Apache bug database where the problem is being tracked. These entries are called "PR"s (Problem Reports). Some bugs do not correspond to problem reports if they are found by developers.

These bugs have been found in 1.3.0 and will be fixed in 1.3.1.

• Apache does not compile on some linux distributions, complaining about a missing header file dlfcn.h. From the next release Apache checks during configuration whether this header file exists.
• The mod_mime_magic module might misidentify documents from other Office applications as MS Word documents. PR#2608.
• apachectl status might fail on some systems. PR#2613.

Patches for bugs in Apache 1.3.0 will be made available in the apply_to_1.3.0 subdirectory of the patches directory on the Apache site. Some new features and other unofficial patches are available in the 1.3 patches directory. For details of all previously reported bugs, see the Apache bug database and known bugs pages. Many common configuration questions are answered in the Apache FAQ.

The next planned release will be 1.3.1 which will contain mainly bug fixes for 1.3.0, with a few minor additional features. There may be a beta period for 1.3.1, but this has not yet been decided.

The syntax for SetEnvIf and related functions has been updated so that they can match against unset headers. The regular expression ^$ now matches if no header of the given name has been sent by the browser. Note that it is not possible to distinguish between the situation where the browser does not send a header and when a browser sends a header which contains no value.

A few modules, such as PHP and Perl, have the capability of loading dynamic code into themselves. Currently this does not work when the module itself is loaded dynamically into Apache. A change in the next version of Apache will let modules which are loaded dynamically to themselves load additional code.

Between Apache 1.2 and Apache 1.3.0 all the API functions were renamed to start with ap_. As an aid to allow older modules to still compile, a header file was was provided with 1.3.0 which mapped the old names onto the new ones. This header file was called compat.h. Unfortunately this filename itself can confilct with other software which contains the same filename, so from 1.3.1 this header will be called ap_compat.h. Similarly, conf.h will be renamed to ap_conf.h to avoid conflicts. For compatibilty, files with the old names will still be distributed, but these will simply #include the new filename.