Next message: Larry Masinter: "RE: Labels"
Message-ID: <65B141FB11CCD211825700A0C9D609BC01879982@chef.lex.rational.com>
From: "Vasta, John" <jvasta@Rational.Com>
To: ietf-dav-versioning@w3.org
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 12:42:17 -0500
Subject: RE: Enumerating repositories and worksp
<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>
<tim>
There are?! Why?
</tim>
There are, in the form of the DAV:versioned-resources, DAV:activities, and
DAV:configurations properties of repositories (section 10.8). And the reason
is so that it is possible to implement the protocol for systems which
constrain resources to exist in repositories. For such systems, you must
specify a repository when you create a resource; that is done by forming the
resource URL using one of these special collections.
<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>
<tim>
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>
I think you can have it both ways, if there was a way to discover whether a
server has constraints or not. The spec is almost there; we just need a way
to discover whether the server has repositories, and where it insists
workspaces be located. If there were two properties defined somewhere (e.g.
DAV:repositories-root and DAV:workspaces-root), then if either of those
properties are defined, a client uses their values to form URLs to
repositories (and therefore activities, configurations, and versioned
resources) or workspaces respectively. If a property is not defined, then
clients are free to use any URL they please, for the corresponding type of
resource.
John