Volunteers are wanted to help address the following issues.  If you
can make a contribution, even if it's as simple as giving advice, send
me (Ben Sugars) an email to bsugars@canoe.ca.


Major Issues
------------

The installation process needs to be improved.  Ideally it should be
able to detect what the correct combination of compilation and linking
options for your system are and go from there.

Extension modules that use dynamic loading of C code remain
problematic.  For me, they only work if the module's shared library
contains a runpath to the shared perl library.  In otherwords, for
module Foo, an ldd on Foo.so needs to show
        libperl.so =>    /lib/perl5/sun4-solaris/5.00401/CORE/libperl.so
or something like that.

Threading.  Grrrr.  Netscape *used* to let you run their multithreaded
servers as multiprocess single-threaded servers if you wanted to.  The
3.x line doesn't let you do this, AFAIK.  So, we need a thread-safe
Perl library.  Steve Nielsen (spn@enteract.com) is working on
integrating the new threaded Perl with nsapi_perl.  Stay tuned.

In the meantime, you can use nsapi_perl with a multi-threaded server
(because the Perl hooks are enclosed in critical sections) but you do
so at your own since if Perl hangs your whole server will freeze
(because the Perl hooks are enclosed in critical sections).


Wishes
------

-The following modules would be very useful:
        -Authentication via DBM
        -Authentication via DBI
        -Persistent database connections
        -Perl embedded in HTML documents
        -Server configuration in Perl

-Basically anything done by Apache/mod_perl I think could, in theory, be done
with nsapi_perl.  (Of course, mod_perl has the advantage of being able to
poke around under the hood of its server.)

-Ben Sugars
<bsugars@canoe.ca>
February 12, 1998
