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Comment by iknowstuff | Hacker News Reader

Probably more efficient to use https://lib.rs/hyper - and actually maintainable.

I can't say a thing about efficiency, but for maintainability, I have to disagree. This seems to be a rust library, and for maintaining that, you'd need to write a program, compile it every time some updates come by, rerun the recompiled program, ...

With the parent comment example, all you need is nginx, available as a package on all distros, and a single static config file. With an auto-updating package manager and a service manager, one never needs to write anything else apart from that static config file.

Or did you mean something else with "actually maintainable"?

I would trust the rust compile/rerun process a lot more than an auto-updating linux distribution, personally. Sooner or later that auto-updating package manager will break your config file, itself, or both.

The majority of nginx distributions will not get any major bumps during the lifetime of the distros they're in. Whether that's because the distro itself has policies against that (Debian, Ubuntu) or because the distro version expires before nginx' stable release does (most of the ones with a higher update frequency, ie. Fedora) so by the time the version expires, they can just go to the next stable version on the release after. This is pretty much only a risk if your distro is completely rolling release and even those in my experience at least offer an "lts" package of some sort.

So that's not a problem. Besides the majority of nginx setups don't rely on too fancy things; most of the stuff that gets changed in updates that affect config files are the fancier nginx modules.

> The majority of nginx distributions will not get any major bumps during the lifetime of the distros they're in. Whether that's because the distro itself has policies against that (Debian, Ubuntu) or because the distro version expires before nginx' stable release does (most of the ones with a higher update frequency, ie. Fedora) so by the time the version expires, they can just go to the next stable version on the release after.

If you're following that approach then having auto updates enabled is kind of irrelevant/meaningless; at some point you're going to be running a very old (and unsupported) version of your distro with all that that implies.

That is true, yeah. But the library in question will also eventually break the existing API / stop supporting compatible releases with security patches. I assume this nginx config will still work for many releases in the future.

> But the library in question will also eventually break the existing API / stop supporting compatible releases with security patches.

Maybe. I have more faith in a Rust library to maintain API backward compatibility than a Linux distro, is what I'm saying.

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