PATCH thoughts...

Hello Lisa,

The PATCH proposal is interesting and well designed for the task at
hand.  A couple of thoughts:

o I'm concerned that the provided use cases for PATCH is a bit too
narrow and the system may not be flexible enough to encompass future use
cases.

For example, it may be desirable to create a new file that is the
combination of the PATCH request body and a totally different resource,
rather than patching a file in place.

Another possible use case is that it may be desirable to have the patch
body retrieved from a third-party URI rather than embedded directly in
the request.

Of course, at a quick blush you could simply say that these cases are
out of scope.  But, I think it is worth thinking deeper about the
problem space to see if an even more generic solution doesn't arise.

o Secondly, I would like to see PATCH advocate at least one generic
binary delta format.  Unless I am mistaken, gdiff is only useful for
text documents.

Thanks for your time and effort in writing this document.

-Justin

Received on Wednesday, 28 April 2004 17:48:06 UTC