Re: Proposal: normative changes for profiles

Henry, thanks for your careful input.

Some of the issues you raise were outside the intended scope of this 
proposal (remembering that most of that spec pass by editors was done a 
month ago on the last day of the F2F) ... like how a client "susses" out 
which flavor server it is interacting with.  We had talked about using the 
existence of constraints for this, just no one made a formal proposal on 
that yet.

I am going to take another pass at this proposal based on the 
comments/discussions to date; should have it out later today for scrutiny. 
 In the mean time, responses to a few points below.



> 4.8.3 LDPR servers SHOULD NOT allow clients to create new resources 
> using PATCH. POST (to an LDPC) and/or PUT should be used as the ...
> 
> I think it would be good to come up with some interesting examples 
> to help us tune our intutions.

This part surprises me.  The examples would be the same as for PUT-create; 
semantically the same intent, just a different syntax.  5789 does 
explicitly allow Patch to be used for creation, as is noted somewhere in 
the existing text/threads.  Or am I missing your point?



> 5.8.1 LDPC servers are RECOMMENDED to support HTTP PATCH as the 
> preferred method for updating LDPC non-membership properties. 
> vanilla: MUST 
> chocolate: SHOULD 
 
> why SHOULD for chocolate?

The general approach the editors took during that pass was minimal change. 
 Unless we had some compelling reason, we were biased toward keeping the 
constraints unchanged for chocolate (recommended == should) as they were, 
and (as TimBL suggested) tightening constraints on vanilla.
I don't know that the net result would be any different if we did a new 
pass today, although the reason would be different.  Until we have an 
agreed-upon patch format, MUSTing it does not improve interop; and 
progress on a patch format seems stalled.  Given the criticisms commenters 
had about inlining around incompleteness, the same should be true for 
Patch; it's just in the latter case that most/all (including myself, 
personally) are more attached to Patch even with the gaping interop hole.


Best Regards, John

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