RE: etags in If: headers (was: 54th IETF Meeting Information, and RFC2518 open issues)

> From: w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org
> [mailto:w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Yves Lafon
> Sent: Friday, April 26, 2002 4:23 AM
> To: Clemm, Geoff
> Cc: Webdav WG (E-mail)
> Subject: RE: etags in If: headers (was: 54th IETF Meeting Information,
> and RFC2518 open issues)
>
>
> On Thu, 25 Apr 2002, Clemm, Geoff wrote:
>
> > exceptional case like this (i.e. losing your lock).
> >
> > So until a use case is identified that cannot be easily handled by
> > other machinery, I suggest we limit the If header to just lock tokens.
>
> Well, using also ETag verification allows consistency check. If you still
> have your lock and the ETag has changed, then it's because something nasty
> happened on the server side (as the ETag represents more or less a version
> tag of the resource).

That would be an internal server error -- I don't think the *protocol* needs
to allow discovery of problem like these...

> As it won't cost anything, I don't understand why you want to remove a
> consistency check.

Well, that's exactly the point: every feature that's hard to implement, of
questionable use *does* cost (in implementation/debugging time).

So the feature should stay if

- it gives us something that can't be easily done otherwise

- we have proven interoperability.