Locking a Resource or Locking a URL?

One of the key topics in the recent thread on the Adv. Versioning Collection
protocol was the question of what gets locked when you lock a resource.

There are (at least :-) three interpretations:

(1) You are locking only the resource.

(2) You are locking what appears at a given URL (i.e. if the resource
currently selected at that URL also appears at another URL, then the
lock does not apply to accesses through that other URL).

(3) You are locking both the resource and the fact that the resource
appears at the given URL.

In my message in the Adv. Coll. thread, I gave arguments for why
(3) does not work in the context of references and versioning.

In this message, I would like to confirm that nobody believes that
(2) is the correct interpretation.  In particular, I would like to
confirm that if /a/x.html and /b/y.html happen to be the same resource
(by some quirk of the server, say), and /a/x.html is locked, then
a PUT to /b/y.html would fail without the appropriate lock token.

There also is the question of whether lock discovery would detect this
implicit lock on /b/y.html.  This question has two parts ... what do
you think the spec currently says, and what did the spec authors
intend?

Cheers,
Geoff

Received on Thursday, 25 February 1999 23:35:16 UTC