Why does Apache httpd 2.4.x still keep updated from 2012 till now?

Why does Apache httpd 2.4.x still keep updated from 2012 till now?

Apache httpd 2.4 launched its first version (2.4.0) in 2012, and the latest stable version is 2.4.57 released last month.

That means the Apache httpd 2.4.x branch is more than ten years old — and hasn’t released its next major version update during that time.

Some developers lamented that in a world where software versions change regularly, Apache 2.4.x stands out for its unusual longevity.

While that’s not a bad thing, it does look unusual. He also believes that Apache 2.4.0 in 2012 and Apache 2.4.57 in 2023 are not really the same software anymore.

For example, some of these versions added support for WebSocket (2.4.6), added mod_http2 to support HTTP/2 (2.4.17), and other new features and so on.

In this way, Apache httpd 2.4.x has indeed iteratively added many new features.

However, because it adopts the semantic version management strategy, if there is no major change (such as incompatibility with the old version), the main version number will not be modified.

Apache httpd 2.4.x has been fixing bugs and adding some new features, so according to the guidelines, it does not meet the requirements of changing the major version number.

It currently appears that if Apache httpd continues to evolve in this way to support future web changes such as HTTP/3 (assuming there is sufficient demand for them from Apache), it may be a long time before we see Apache 2.6.