Next message: jamsden@us.ibm.com: "DeltaV Design Team Meeting"
From: jamsden@us.ibm.com
To: ietf-dav-versioning@w3.org
Message-ID: <8525690E.005538E1.00@d54mta02.raleigh.ibm.com>
Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2000 11:31:58 -0400
Subject: Branching, repositories, and activities
<geoff>
We spent some time on the CHECKOUT/CHECKIN proposal.
There are several motivations for this proposal. One of
them is support simple branching models such as that of
RCS, where a versioned resource has simple activities
called "branches", but a branch is always relative to a
particular versioned resource (i.e. you create a branch
for a particular versioned resource). Another motivation
is that if a server supports multiple repositories, and
an activity in one repository can only be used for checkouts
and checkins in that repository, then a client needs to
let the server know somehow which repository the activity
should be created in. Another motivation is that even if
"multi-repository" activity membership is supported, that
it is more efficient if the activity is located in the
same repository as "most" of its revisions.
</geoff>
<jra>
The repository will be identified by the URL the user gives for the
activity being created. That is, the activity resource will be created in
some collection which resides in a repository. What, above activities,
needs to be added to support these simple branches? Or are you proposing
that branching be supported directly as "simple activities" for servers
that don't want to support full activity semantics? I think branching is an
implementation mechanism supporting parallel development or multiple
development lines-of-descent while activities are a more logical way of
expressing the same problems. I don't think we need two ways of expressing
these problems, and servers are free to implement activities using
branching.
</jra>