Re: Interoperability and client support of options

On Fri, Feb 09, 2001 at 04:55:17PM -0800, Lisa Dusseault wrote:
>...
> 1) Is anybody planning to implement a client that will interoperate
> against a CORE server, not requiring any advanced options to be there at
> all?

Nope. First release will, in fact, only operate against Subversion servers
due to the use of a custom report. (that's the biggest; I'm not sure if
there are other, tweaky things; in the future, we'll do a fallback if the
server doesn't support the report)

> 2) A slightly different variation: Is anybody planning to implement a
> client that only does core, or will all versioning-aware clients support
> CHECKOUT/CHECKIN as well?

No. CHECKOUT of version resources only (i.e. working resource option)

> Will all versioning-aware clients support
> version-history?

What does "support" mean. The server manages these guys. What would the
client do with them?

> 3) Is anybody planning to use NONE OF these options:
>  - working resource option
>  - client workspace option

The above two are the same.

>  - Workspace option
> In other words, is anybody planning to expose the results of
> work-in-progress, on the VCR, to all clients doing read operations?

The SVN server only supports working resources.
[ and only working resources that are checked out directly into an existing
  activity ]

> 4) Can a client that does the checkout option but not the "working
> resource" option operate against servers with the "Working Resource"
> option?

If they observe the Location: header returned from the CHECKOUT, they can
probably interoperate properly.

Note that it is a misstatement to say the client does / does not do the
"working resource" option. Servers do that. If you mean to say, "if a client
checks out a version resource, then what happens on a server that doesn't
support working resources?" The answer is: failure.

> 5) Can a client that doesn't know about the UPDATE option interoperate
> with VCRs that have had UPDATE applied to them?

You started with a query about what people are planning to do. By this
question, you've totally moved into questions about DeltaV itself.

A client should be able to use resources that have UPDATE applied to them.
But you're going to have to narrow the question: what types of operations
are you thinking of? You can't expect us to iterate over every single thing
and tell you what will happen.

> Rather than make an exhaustive list of these kinds of questions, I'll
> just note that I could raise similar issues for just about every option
> in the draft.  So here's how to head off that flood of questions!  For
> every option, please add a little "interoperability" section, explaining

*WHO* are you expecting to do this? Why don't you start us off with some
text for one or more sections.

It isn't nice to impose work on people without providing some of your own
assistance.

And this is *way* off the subject of what kinds of clients people will be
writing, and what they expect of the servers they talk to.


The SVN client expects (ie. fails if these are not present):

*) activities
*) baselines
*) MERGE
*) working resources
*) REPORT
*) version-controlled collections

And a smattering of other bits (e.g. some of fork-control: two people
can/should be able to check out the same resource at the same time; only one
can check it back in, though)

Cheers,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/

Received on Friday, 9 February 2001 21:09:04 UTC