RE: Move and Delete (was: bind draft issues)

> A MOVE is a simple namespace operation. All it needs to do is 
> check locks.
> 
> A DELETE that cleans up in the foreground will need to check delete
> privileges on all descendants. This set can be very huge. I 
> think it's an
> extremely bad idea to do this in a single transaction (yes, we tried).
> 

Actually, collection MOVE suffers from the same problems as collection
DELETE.  Here are some of them.
 - You can't MOVE a file you don't have permission to write. Therefore,
the server must check write privileges on all descendants.
 - A WebDAV application server may be used to unify a number of back-end
storage servers under the same namespace.  So the server's URL
http://www.example.com/software/ may contain files stored on
//davfiles/software, whereas the server's URL
http://www.example.com/userdocs/ may contain files stored on
//davfiles/userdocs.  A server moving a collection from one of these
top-level-directories to the other would have to do a network
cross-repository move under the covers. This may not be feasible to do
atomically.

Lisa