Re: proposal for OPTIONS

From: Geoffrey M. Clemm (geoffrey.clemm@rational.com)
Date: Thu, Sep 28 2000

  • Next message: Geoffrey M. Clemm: "Versioning TeleConf Agenda, 9/29/00 (Friday) 11-12 EST"

    Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 23:35:53 -0400 (EDT)
    Message-Id: <200009290335.XAA29589@tantalum.atria.com>
    From: "Geoffrey M. Clemm" <geoffrey.clemm@rational.com>
    To: ietf-dav-versioning@w3.org
    Subject: Re: proposal for OPTIONS
    
    
    Boris's proposal with Ron's Depth response variation look fine to me.
    Unless anyone has a better idea, I'll use this for the 09 (last call)
    draft.
    
    The only change that I'd make is that I believe we need to replace
    "core-versioning" with "version-selector-checkout" and "version-checkout",
    since those are two distinct alternatives.
    
    Cheers,
    Geoff
    
       From: Ron Jacobs <rjacobs@gforce.com>
       Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 11:51:57 -0700
    
       Boris,
    
       An excellent proposal. Might I suggest a slight improvement?
    
       The OPTIONS response could reuse the Depth: header to indicate whether the
       response is
       valid for all members of a resource collection. The default would be Depth:0
       in order
       to remain compatible with existing servers. If the server wishes to indicate
       that it's
       response is valid for the whole sub tree then it can do so by including
       Depth:infinity
       in the response.
    
       As a further improvement, the OPTIONS request could be spec'ed to contain a
       Depth:
       header. I must say, I'm not as fond of this idea because the server should
       be in control
       of how much work it has to do to respond to OPTIONS and the client can
       always send
       additional requests if the server did not provide sufficient response.
       (i.e., if it did
       not respond with the Depth:infinity header)
    
       Backward compatibility is important here as the advanced versioning server
       may be
       responding to a non-versioning WebDAV client, or even, for that matter, to
       an HTTP 1.1
       client.
    
       BTW, whatever happened to specifying an asterisk URL (e.g., OPTIONS *
       HTTP/1.1) to
       request capabilities of a server?
    
       Thanks, Ron
    
       -----Original Message-----
       From: Boris Bokowski/OTT/OTI [mailto:Boris_Bokowski@oti.com]
       Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2000 10:58 AM
       To: ietf-dav-versioning@w3.org
       Subject: proposal for OPTIONS
    
    
       Here is a proposal for spec'ing the OPTIONS request. 
    
       First of all, to attack the problem that OPTIONS, although applied to a 
       resource, should report capabilities of a server:
    
       "The DAV response header for an OPTIONS request applies to a resource and 
       all its members. If a DAV response header contains one or more of 
       'core-versioning', 'workspace', 'versioned-collection', 
       'baselined-collection', 'activity', 'merge', the DAV response header for 
       its members MUST at least contain these as well."
    
       Spec'd this way, it is sufficient to query the root of a resource subtree 
       in order to discover the versioning capabilities for all resources in the 
       subtree.
    
       ... rest omitted ...