RE: v0.2 draft Distributed Editing Reqts.

>Such higher level locking actions can be implemented using single-entity
>locks, and hence I'd prefer not to introduce the added complexity of
>multiple entity simultaneous locks.
>
>- Jim
>
If a user locks files A, B, & C with separate locks and performs a PUT
to A, there is no guarantee that the locks on B & C have not been
already been broken. Thus a mechanism is needed to perform actions on a
group of files in such a way that each individual action is guaranteed
to be atomic with respect to the lock on those files.

Your own paper includes a perfect example of this - A user wishes to
lock an entire web site so as to be able to guarantee global consistency
even if they are only interested in changing a single file. If they have
to lock every file individually, a bandwidth eating action I might add,
they still have no guarantee of global consistency as one or more locks
could be removed for any number of reasons. A multi-file lock will
guarantee that an action will only go through if all the relevant files
are still locked.

>					Yaron
>

Received on Friday, 6 September 1996 15:54:51 UTC