Re: configurations and all that...
Sankar Virdhagriswaran (sv@crystaliz.com)
Wed, 7 Apr 1999 08:59:32 -0400
Message-ID: <009a01be80f6$a113eba0$e6ea7392@honeybee>
From: "Sankar Virdhagriswaran" <sv@crystaliz.com>
To: "Jeff McAffer OTT" <Jeff_McAffer@oti.com>,
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 08:59:32 -0400
Subject: Re: configurations and all that...
Jeff,
I have not read through your note in detail. But, I must say that I find the
distinction you made matches exactly with my model of the world. I think
your note brings up the key issues that I have been struggling with. To me
the user model is as follows: Groups
of
authors are operating in parallel on deeply nested collections. Workspaces
are mechanism to provide a 'selection' (i.e., a view) of the collections and
items within these collections that are revision controlled.
I have excerpted statements from your message that I agree to and I hope the
design team would also take a look at them:
1. "Let's turn the table a little and focus on the user view. Users have
(potentially numerous and deep) collections of resource revisions
identified by workspace RSRs and they want to capture them (perhaps
independently) for later reuse. They might have all manner of stuff in
their workspaces. Some of it ready to go to production, some just
starting prototyping. The workspace is not the focus, the collections of
resources are. The workspace is the view onto, or context for, the
resources (i.e., specs revisions via RSRs) but that's it."
2. "Other WebDAV
people have been working hard on collection semantics. I suspect that
versioning will have many of the same issues. It would be great if we
could derive our semantics from theirs so we appear as a simple variation
(if at all)."
// the following two excerpts (3 and 4) to me are the most important one to
me
// the 'exchange or shipped' is where interesting requirements are hiding
3. "While these components
are often shared, exchanged, shipped, ... (whatever) in groups, the
grouping may change from operation to operation or user to user."
4. "Prerequisites (i.e., needed configs) are useful ways
for users to group/reuse logically coherent resource sets but BEWARE!
Maintaining these dependencies is a NON-TRIVIAL amount of work for the
user."
5. "I sure hope configurations have a lightweight
implementation (in both speed and space)."
6. "Users are going to define this granularity. For some, the
collections they want to deep revision contain whole websites and they
will have only one collection, for others they contain one part of one
component and they have thousands. It is whatever makes sense for the
user's domain. We would do well to not make too many assumptions about
this."