LABEL method in advanced

<geoff>We had a combination of weak preferences to leave it in core, and a
strong preference (from Geoff) to move it into advanced.  Geoff's
rationale was that Lisa had effectively provided an existence proof
that useful versioning behavior can be provided without labels, and
that although core should be designed to be compatible with the
advanced versioning features, the actual contents of core should be
focused on common or essential versioning features in both document
and configuration management sytems.</geoff>

<jra>Note that just because a versioning repository manager doesn't support
labels doesn't mean that a WebDAV server on that repository manager can't
support labels. There are lots of WebDAV semantics that are not directly
mapped to the underlying repository that have to be implemented in the
server. For example, the UNIX and Windows file systems don't support
arbitrary properties on files, but the Apache/mod_dav server supports
properties by using a separate database. We should be careful about using
existing repository implementations solely as an argument for
including/excluding functions. I agree with JimW that labeling versions is
a fundamental concept that should be part of core. That fact that a number
of repository managers don't support this doesn't provide motivation for
moving it to advanced to me because 1) these repository managers aren't
trying to be THE Web distributed authoring and versioning protocol
(supporting distributed, multi-user, multi-version access), 2) they aren't
prime movers in the repository marketplace, and 3) a number of the ones
Lisa mentioned would like to add label support.</jra>

Received on Sunday, 8 October 2000 12:40:48 UTC