On Sat, 2025-02-22 at 18:55 -0800, Zoltan Puskas wrote:
Hi,
This seems to be a significant change to nginx. While I think breaking out
modules is a good idea, I was wondering how it was determined which modules are
low usage or "needless"? I think some of these module removals actually might
break other Gentoo packages in some cases.
Hello,
I apologise for not putting much thought into evaluating usefulness of NGINX
modules. Not using third-party modules myself, the task of porting (i.e.
separating an NGINX module into its own package) modules was always of lower
priority to me. Being unable to come up with a good way to enquire about Gentoo
users' usage patterns, I selected which modules will be separated and which
retired mostly at random. Actually, at this point, I can no longer recall why I
ported specifically the modules I ported.
However, thanks to your feedback, I realise that I should have spent a bit more
time researching which plugins are popular and widely used and which are not so.
Looking at the list of modules you provided, it is ought to be a trivial matter
to get them packaged. So do not worry, this will be taken care of. They will get
ported and will be available as separate packages.
I am going to consult with other Gentoo developers to find a way to tackle this
problem. Nonetheless, if you have any ideas on what plugins should also be
ported, please drop a letter, your input is really important for us :)
+1. Third-party modules.
+
+Third-party modules, which were previously part of the NGINX package,
+www-servers/nginx, are now separate packages in the www-nginx/ category.
+The Lua, Brotli, headers-more and upload-progress are examples of the
+modules that have been separated. Some of the modules have been removed
+completely due to their apparent low usage and needlessness.
+
+The following is a list of modules that have been removed. If you rely
+on any of the modules outlined below, please file a bug on Gentoo
+Bugzilla[2][3] asking the module to be added. The recommended summary
+for a bug is "www-servers/nginx: please add module MODULE_NAME", where
+MODULE_NAME is the name of the module you would like to see added.
+
+Removed modules:
+ - ngx_cache_purge/http_cache_purge_module
+ - nginx_ngx_slowfs_cache/http_slowfs_cache_module
+ - ngx-fancyindex/http_fancyindex_module
+ - ngx_http_auth_pam_module/http_authpam_module
+ - nginx_upstream_check_module/http_upstream_check_module
+ - ngx_metrics/http_metrics_module
+ - naxsi/http_naxsi_module
+ - nginx-rtmp-module/rtmp_module
+ - nginx-dav-ext-module/http_dav_ext_module
+ - ModSecurity-nginx/http_security_module
+ - nginx-push-stream-module/http_push_stream_module
+ - nginx-sticky-module-ng/http_sticky_module
+ - nginx-mogilefs-module/http_mogilefs_module
+ - nginx-auth-ldap/http_auth_ldap_module
+ - nginx-vod-module/http_vod_module
+ - ngx_http_geoip2_module/http_geoip2_module
+
From the removed list above I already see that there are modules that I use all
the time and I was wondering if I should file the bugs now preemptively or
should I wait for the PR to be merged.
Modules in question are:
- ngx-fancyindex/http_fancyindex_module:
I think it's a really useful module to make direcotry listings nicer with
minimal effort. I personally used it for old school open "pub" directories
where I just store files for easy access over the web.
- nginx-dav-ext-module/http_dav_ext_module:
This is required for anyone self hosting anything DAV. One such app in the
Gentoo repository is www-apps/baikal, which if paired with DAVx5 [1] Android
application, can be used as a self-hosted private contacts and calendar
backend.
- nginx-vod-module/http_vod_module:
Having DASH and friends capability makes it easy to host adaptive bitrate
video streaming using simple HTML <video> tags. AFAIK all browsers support
DASH for quite some time now. I don't see how simple video streaming is
useless. I feel nginx-rtmp-module/rtmp_module falls under this category too
since it's used by the popular JW Player, but also can be used by VLC and
OBS.
- ngx_http_geoip2_module/http_geoip2_module:
Interesting choice, especially since GeoIP has been deprecated in favour of
GeoIP2 in 2019[2]. It's a useful module, and IMHO and should be kept instead
of the old GeoIP one, especially since the old database is not updated any
more.
Cheers,
Zoltan
[1] https://www.davx5.com/
[2]
https://web.archive.org/web/20190930210358/https://support.maxmind.com/geolite-legacy-discontinuation-notice/
