Re: Discussion Topic: Simple Version Selection and Checkout

Geoffrey M. Clemm (gclemm@tantalum.atria.com)
Fri, 29 Jan 1999 22:41:39 -0500 

Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 22:41:39 -0500
Message-Id: <9901300341.AA22811@tantalum>
From: "Geoffrey M. Clemm" <gclemm@tantalum.atria.com>
To: sv@crystaliz.com
Cc: ietf-dav-versioning@w3.org
In-Reply-To: <008d01be4bed$a2a4e340$794006d1@honey-bee> (sv@crystaliz.com)
Subject: Re: Discussion Topic: Simple Version Selection and Checkout

   From: "Sankar Virdhagriswaran" <sv@crystaliz.com>

   While labels are considered to be light-weight mechanisms in software
   development community, it is not considered to be so with many web site
   development groups I have talked to. This is because consistent naming of
   lables require some administrative overhead (an administrator for instance)
   that many of these groups don't have.

   I was only saying that the protocol should not prevent an implementation
   wherein revision selection may be done manually without automatic version
   selection rules.

There are two issues here.  There's the GUI issue, which is how does the
user say "I want to see this revision", and then there is the protocol
question which is "how does the client tell the server that the user wants
to see this revision".

For example, from a GUI perspective, the client could look up the
user's last workspace, or ask the user at the beginning of a session
which workspace they want to use, and then the client would remember
this.  Then the user can just point at some GUI representation of the
revision they want selected.

Once the client has gathered this information in a user-friendly way,
the protocol question is: Is it an acceptable protocol for the client
to relay this information to the server in the form:
- set the version-selection-rule of the workspace to be "label=FOO"
- place the label FOO on the revisions selected by the user

Note: this is *not* an attempt to convert anyone (at least, not yet :-),
but rather a solicitation for information.  If the concept of a workspace
or a label is too divergent from what a document management server or
client can do, then we need to find out exactly why that is so that we
can design an alternative.

Cheers,
Geoff