Problems with Windows XP "redirector" and Mac OS X WebDAVFS.

Hi,

We've been testing Merant versioning WebDAV server with Windows XP
"redirector" and Mac OS X WebDAVFS. The behavior of our versioning WebDAV
server is equivalent to the behavior of the DeltaV server with auto
versioning.

On the surface things seems to be working but if you look closer the
situation is really bad. Both clients behave like a file system and perform
what is called a "safe save". This means that the new changes are saved in a
temporary file on the WebDAV server, the old file is deleted and then the
temp file is renamed. This means that when a file is being saved we lose the
previous versions, a new version history is created. Both clients also
create a few versions that seem to contain some temporary values making the
version history unacceptably polluted.

We are quite concerned since both Windows XP "redirector" and Mac OS
WebDAVFS would enable access to WebDAV server from any application on those
platforms. With this behavior the only solution for us or a DeltaV server
would be to deny the write access to these agents so that the user data is
not destroyed and polluted. This is quite a change from our expectations on
what DeltaV would do for us and we are hoping that some solutions can be
still found.

Did anybody test these clients with a DeltaV server implementation? Any
comments, suggestions, explanations?

Kasia

Received on Tuesday, 23 April 2002 14:10:04 UTC