Redirects Policy

There's been some discussion in
   http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=258433
about how we want to do redirects on mozilla.org

There are two main issues:
   - putting redirects in .htaccess is more maintainable
     (because we can change them through cvs rather than
     server config)

   - enabling .htaccess files has a performance hit, as Anne
     notes in
       http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=258433#c11

     Apache's notes on performance-tuning:
       http://httpd.apache.org/docs/misc/perf-tuning.html#runtime
     Here's a (possibly biased) bit of statistics
       http://litespeedtech.com/benchmark.html

It seems that we can limit .htaccess files to only certain
directories by using <Directory> directives, so I suggest doing
that as a compromise. We'd have to consolidate the .htaccess
files a bit, but I'm guessing this will improve performance
while keeping the redirect lists easily maintainable.
Something like

   Don't allow in root (use conf files for root redirects)
   Allow in subdirectories of root
   Don't allow in subdirectories of subdirectories of root
   Don't allow in /products
   Allow in /products/*
   Allow in random other necessary places (like /projects/ui/accessibility).

I'm not familiar with configuring webservers, however, so
what do you all think?

~fantasai

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