Re: Draft v1 Update for Resumable Uploads

Gouye,

It was not immediately clear to me on initially reading the draft exactly
what the intent of this proposal is with regards to the existing usage of
multipart by clients to upload files (
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7578).  Some more text in the
intro (and 3.2 series of parts) to help to make the intent clearer.

To be clear myself, I understand that:

   1. This is not a replacement for multipart uploads, rather it is a
   mechanism that could be applied on top that could allow a multipart upload
   (among other content types) to be interrupted and resumed.
   2. The usage of this mechanism to deliberately split an upload into
   parts is distinct from RFC7578 parts (although no reason why each RFC7578
   part could not be sent in a separate resumable request if server support is
   known).
   3. The use of this mechanism to initiate parallel requests to "speed up"
   the upload is explicitly not allowed.  Perhaps you should note that this is
   asymmetric to down loads with range request, which can be done in
   parallel.
   4. When the server is queried for an offset, it is free to pick an
   offset as it likes. For example, it could wind back the transfer to the
   last boundary of a multi-part content, even if some of those bytes had
   already been received.      Could the server use this mechanism to skip
   ahead?  for example during a large upload the server determines that it is
   only interested in the last part of the content. The if the server closes
   the current transfer and when a offset query request is received, can it
   send an offset in advance of any bytes sent by the client, so the client
   would then need to skip through to the offset (rather than rewind)?


regards




On Fri, 17 Jun 2022 at 07:36, Guoye Zhang <guoye_zhang@apple.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Our previous resumable upload draft generated a lot of discussions. I’m
> glad to announce that we have a new draft ready to address many feedbacks
> that suggested adopting the PATCH method. In this draft, we split the
> Upload Transfer Procedure into 2 separate procedures: Upload Creation
> Procedure and Upload Appending Procedure.
>
>
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-tus-httpbis-resumable-uploads-protocol/
>
> 1. Content-Range
>
> We attempted adopting Content-Range header, however, we realized that it
> doesn’t support unknown lengths which is an important use case that our
> clients require. Therefore we kept Upload-Offset and Upload-Incomplete
> headers.
>
> We are open to discuss other options, such as modifying the semantics of
> the Content-Range header if that’s preferred, although it might cause more
> breakages than defining new headers.
>
> 2. Media types
>
> PATCH currently doesn’t define a media type. We went through the list of
> media types but couldn’t find the appropriate category for the Upload
> Appending Procedure. It is a generic byte-appending operation that can
> modify any types of media, so we don’t think it fits into an application
> media type.
>
> We are open to suggestions if a media type is desired.
>
> 3. 1xx intermediate response
>
> We surveyed the most popular HTTP libraries in many languages, and nearly
> all of them consider 1xx responses an internal signaling mechanism so they
> don’t expose the ability for applications to handle them. (We are also
> guilty of this as maintainers of URLSession API on Apple platforms.) If we
> use 1xx response for any critical information, it would prevent nearly all
> tus-v1 adopters to switch to this new protocol until it’s natively
> supported in HTTP libraries.
>
> We think having just the feature detection part using 1xx response is a
> good balance, both eliminating any extra round trips for HTTP libraries
> implementing this protocol and allowing application adopters to ignore it.
>
> 4. Can we PATCH a PATCH?
>
> Yes, Upload Creation Procedure supports any method, including PATCH. We
> included a section “Request Identification” about the nuances in this area.
> Unfortunately, this added complexity is the result of splitting the
> procedures, but we don’t think it will complicate the implementations in
> most cases. Servers can still decide what methods make sense for their use
> case and whether to support PATCH.
>
>
> Looking forward to continuing the discussions and refinements of the draft.
>
> Best regards,
> Guoye Zhang
>


-- 
Greg Wilkins <gregw@webtide.com> CTO http://webtide.com