Re: Enumerating repositories and worksp

From: Tim Ellison OTT (Tim_Ellison@oti.com)
Date: Wed, Feb 23 2000

  • Next message: Vasta, John: "RE: Enumerating repositories and worksp"

    From: Tim_Ellison@oti.com (Tim Ellison OTT)
    To: jvasta@Rational.Com (Vasta, John)
    Cc: ietf-dav-versioning@w3.org ('Delta V')
    Message-ID: <2000Feb23.120818.1250.1485931@otismtp.ott.oti.com>
    Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 12:08:51 -0500
    Subject: Re: Enumerating repositories and worksp
    
    
    <tim>
    The principle adopted so far has been that workspaces, repositories, etc. 
    are just resources, and can be managed in the URL namespace however the 
    client chooses.  The server is free to restrict the areas where these 
    resources are stored, but there is no 'meta'-area containing such resources.
    </tim>
    
       <john>
       If the server is free to have restrictions, then how can
       clients discover what the restrictions are? I don't see
       how clients can do much of anything without knowing
       how to form URLs to resources, if there are restrictions
       on the form of those URLs.
       </john>
    
    You're right.  My recollection was that the repository would list these 
    restrictions (as it does for the location of versioned resources and 
    BIND-able resources).
    
    <tim>
    As such there is no way for clients to discover all workspaces any more than 
    there is a way to discover all activities or configurations, etc. It is 
    unclear to me that the client should be shown all possible repositories in a 
    browser.
    </tim>
    
       <john>
       But you can discover all activities, configurations, and
       versioned resources in a given repository; there are
       special collections defined for them, and a server is
       allowed to restrict those resources to be contained in
       those collections.
       </john>
    
    There are?!  Why?
    
       <john>
       If a client cannot discover what the repositories are,
       how can it specify the location of any of the resources
       which are in those constrained areas?
       </john>
    
    Agreed.  We should either specify eveything, then the client is 'routed' to 
    the right place to do their stuff, or we specify nothing and anarchy applies 
    (i.e., all resources are equal and clients decide where things will be 
    stored).
    
    Tim