- From: Geoffrey M. Clemm <geoffrey.clemm@rational.com>
- Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2001 09:16:58 -0500 (EST)
- To: ietf-dav-versioning@w3.org
Edgar's proposal is basically to keep the current "mutable version" semantics, but to require that once "ismutable" is set to "true", it cannot be set back to "false". This is certainly sensible, but unfortunately does not address the key problem with the "mutable version" semantics. In particular, since a server can just refuse to let you set the ismutable flag to true, it means that a client cannot count on a server providing stable URL's (and so any client that does need stable URL's will not interoperate with such a server). It's also important to point out that those who are in favor of mutable versions want to have "human meaningful" URL's for those mutable versions. I believe that any sensible server will refuse to let you set the "immutable" flag on any version with a human meaningful name, since over time, this would result in the limited number of human meaningful names being "used up" by immutable version URL's. So it is unlikely that anybody was ever going to support the "ismutable" transition from "false" to "true" anyway. The key point here is that a "stable name" is incompatible with a "human meaningful name", so any attempt to unify "resources with stable names" and "resources with human meaningful names" will never succeed. The point of the "variant" proposal is to say that we already have defined resources that have "human meaningful names" and are "mutable" ... they are version-controlled resources. If you want to have a resource that is mutable and has a human meaningful name assigned by the server, then all we need is to provide a way for the server to expose a set of version-controlled resources with server-defined names. And that is what a "variant" is. I'll post a version of the protocol with the "variant option" defined, to make the proposal more concrete. Cheers, Geoff From: Edgar@EdgarSchwarz.de Why not define a version resource as having a state: State = "working" | "approved" # The names aren't that important. The lifecyle has two states: "working" -> "approved" For documents we can set state to "working". As long as the author thinks he could still change something he can leave it in this state. And anybody is warned by the state that it can still change.
Received on Sunday, 7 January 2001 09:17:46 UTC