Re: Last call: range locking

I personally wouldn't mind having some precedents on how to deal with
arbitrary subparts of a resource. There will be many more situations
besides locking in which handling subparts will become useful.

Two points I would like to stress:

a) "Ranges", as in "byte-ranges", are too restrictive and implementation
oriented for being really and generally useful. Can't we provide a more
fuzzy and evocative term?

b) Specifying the management of subparts as one of the requirements that
WebDAV needs to discuss does not mean that solutions need to be invented
anew.

So I believe we should definitely state an agreeable requirement for
managing partial resources, and then happily discuss on range URLs or
RANGELOCK or whatever.

As I have learnt the hard way from Yaron :-), we should keep requirements
and implementation separated. We can have as many and as different
requirements as we care, and the discussion needs to be on their
justifications only.

When someone proposes a solution, well, the relevant requirements should
have been accepted already.

Therefore, if eventually range URLs will be commonplace, we will find out
that the requirement of partial locks is already and naturally satisfied by
a plain lock on a range URL, and we won't need to deal with it any further.

>Pro Range Locking - Steve Carter, Yaron Y. Goland, and Gregory J.
>Woodhouse,
>Anti Range Locking - Larry Masinter, Mark Day, and Fabio Vitali

Er, it's not that I am anti range locking, I am anti locking tout court, as
I believe we will have to face problems with *any* kind of locks, although
I'll admit that problems with ranges will be more frequent than with other
types of locking.

Fabio

Fabio Vitali                            Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly,
Dept of Computer Science         Man got to sit and wonder "Why, why, why?'
Univ. of Bologna  ITALY               Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land,
e-mail: fabio@cs.unibo.it            Man got to tell himself he understand.
                                                             Kurt Vonnegut

Received on Tuesday, 4 March 1997 12:56:20 UTC