Re: Branching, repositories, and activities

From: Geoffrey M. Clemm (geoffrey.clemm@rational.com)
Date: Sat, Jul 01 2000

  • Next message: jamsden@us.ibm.com: "Re: Branching, repositories, and activities"

    Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2000 23:30:30 -0400 (EDT)
    Message-Id: <200007020330.XAA02507@tantalum.atria.com>
    From: "Geoffrey M. Clemm" <geoffrey.clemm@rational.com>
    To: ietf-dav-versioning@w3.org
    Subject: Re: Branching, repositories, and activities
    
    
       From: jamsden@us.ibm.com
    
       ... are you proposing
       that branching be supported directly as "simple activities" for servers
       that don't want to support full activity semantics?
    
    I wasn't proposing that the protocol identify two kinds of activities,
    but rather that the protocol be designed so that a single client could
    interoperate with a server that only supports per-resource activities,
    as well as with a server that supports an activity that collects
    revisions from multiple versioned resources.
    
    
       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.
    
    There is no proposal that we have two ways to express the same
    problem.  The questions are:
    - should you be able to say "check this out (or in) in a new activity"
    - should you be able to say "create an activity" (independent of any
      checkout).
    
    Perhaps the easiest answer is to just say "yes" to both, and therefore
    both allow "CHECKOUT/new-activity" as well as MKACTIVITY (which allows
    the creation of an activity that is not yet associated with any
    versioned resource).
    
    Cheers,
    Geoff