RE: Initial Dist. Auth. Requirements

Overall I am a very happy camper. I think the document does an excellent 
job of addressing the main issues while leaving minor ones to be squabbled 
over later. However I am definitely itching to get into the blood and guts 
of how we intend to implement this stuff.

I noticed that partial writes were not addressed. If I am editing a 10 
megabyte file and want to change a single word I am forced to upload the 
entire file. With partial writes I can just change the areas I am 
interested in.

We also need to address an issue I neglected to address in my original 
document - Insertion Writes. I have added the following sentence to section 
1, Partial [Read | Write] in my needs document: "In addition a mechanism is 
needed to do insert writes such that one can specify that a section of 
bytes should be inserted into the file at a specified position."

Section 1. Source retrieval
The connection between 'presentation' and 'source' isn't straight forward. 
For example, what is the source of a program? The obvious answer would be 
the source code but what about the object files? There should be mention of 
these complex relationships and the possibility that the path from 
presentation to source may be linear with many nodes or may have many 
branches. I admit my bias here in thinking that the whole issue of "Get for 
Edit" should be absorbed into Section 5 - Relationships.

Sections 2 & 3 - Locks and Independence of Locks
I realize I am perilously close to nit picking but I am uncomfortable with 
the use of the word Lock in this context. Especially in light of point 4. I 
realize that Check Out is a loaded term because different systems implement 
it in different ways but Lock is an equally loaded term.
A more substantial issue is partial write locks. Industrial strength 
distributed authoring involves large files with complex structures. Partial 
write locks are necessary if we are going to have several different authors 
munging through the same file. This issue becomes even more relevant when 
databases are shared.

Section 7.
This is just an editing point but I think the wording of the last paragraph 
in this section should read "FrontPage from Microsoft also..."

					Yaron

Received on Friday, 30 August 1996 01:15:27 UTC