Labels and Status

Dear Colleagues,

There seem to be some confusion in the protocol description as to for
what Labels are good.  At least the example is misleading.  A label with
the name released is in general not useful, because released has the
character of status and a file may have only one revision with the label
released.  Over the course of time several versions will be "released".
A better example would be the label release_3.1.

Since there are revision control systems that support a status
property, it would make sense to support it explicitly as an option.
Status can not be implemented as a dead property for two reason:
  1) a versioned resource or working resource that is updated or created
     by a check-out request should NOT inherit the value of the status
     of the version being checked out, instead it should be set to a
     server defined base value or left empty; and
  2) status should be changeable on a version without creating a new
     version, similar to label.
Systems that implement both base-lines and status should provide a status
for base-lines.  The value of status should be an NMTOKEN.

Sincerely,
James J. Hunt
Jürgen Reuter

Received on Friday, 2 February 2001 09:56:02 UTC