"Closing" an activity

I'm following up on this discussion from 

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-dav-versioning/2001OctDec/0021.html

in a separate thread. At this point, I'm just looking 
for clarification whether my interpretation of the 
spec is accurate.

I wrote:

   - Activity feature: Is there an interoperable way to
     "close" an activity (that is, prevent any more
     checkouts or checkins in that activity)? Followup:
     if not, how much demand would there be for
     standardizing this concept?

Geoff replied:

     I suggest we should soon start a follow-on "change
     request" working group (we could start under the
     auspices of the WebDAV working group).  In
     particular, we would then discuss various states
     that an activity could be in, and how to
     standardize transitions between those states (is
     PROPPATCH enough?).  Minimally, we could decide on
     some standard XML element for the state field of
     an activity, and a few "standard" state values.
     Perhaps a BOF at the Dec IETF?

--

Continuing this discussion, Geoff's proposal sounds
reasonable to me, though I'm not sure I have any
activity states to propose beyond "closed" and "not
closed."

To validate my understanding of the spec, it seems to
me that there is currently no interoperable way to
prevent checkouts and checkins from occurring in an
activity. 

In particular, RFC 2518 write locks on the activity
resource don't do this because RFC 2518 Section 9.3
says

   While those without a write lock may not alter a
   property on a resource it is still possible for the
   values of live properties to change, even while
   locked, due to the requirements of their schemas.
   Only dead properties and live properties defined to
   respect locks are guaranteed not to change while
   write locked.

So taking a write lock on the activity resource does
not restrict changes on that activity's
DAV:activity-version-set or DAV:activity-checkout-set
property values.

Also, draft-ietf-webdav-acl-06 Section 3.2 says 

   The [DAV:write] privilege controls methods that
   modify the content, dead properties, or (in the case
   of a collection) membership of a resource, such as
   PUT or PROPPATCH.

So restricting the DAV:write privilege in an activity
resource's DAV:acl property doesn't restrict changes in
that activity's DAV:activity-version-set or
DAV:activity-checkout-set either.

Is my understanding correct?

Thanks,
Roy

Received on Sunday, 7 October 2001 13:41:43 UTC