RE: Last call: range locking

At 11:21 AM -0800 3/4/97, Yaron Goland wrote:
>I second the motion. Let the requirements document read:"Whereas
>documents may contain defined sections, specified by such concepts as
>pages, chapters, and byte ranges, and whereas the purpose of DAV is to
>facilitate the editing of a single document simultaneously by multiple
>users, and whereas often multiple users wish to independently edit
>different sections of a document, let the DAV protocol provide a
>mechanism to identify these defined sections and determine their URLs so
>as to prevent collisions amongst multiple users."
>Or something less pompous than that =)

Since I'm with Fabio in being anti-locking generally, though I agree with
him that we need to accommodate it for those who want it -- why not say
that it's a requirement that DAV not _PREVENT_ such sub-resource locking
behavior.

    I don't think we're going to put in URL-hacking rules for fractional
resources -- and I don't think that we should. Servers can provide whatever
resources they want, and those may in fact overlap in terms of the
_server's storage model_ -- but this requires no special support in the
protocol. It will require a lot of work for the server, but that's it's
problem.

   So essentially, I think Jim's first post is right (and Larry is right)
there's no need to mention range locking in the requirements because it's a
_result_ of support for resource locking -- for any servers that wish to
create resources to represent lockable ranges. So we may have lockable
ranges, but I don't think there's any reason that they need to be in the
requirements, or the protocol explicitly. They need to be in the
documentation for servers that need to provide sub-resources.

  -- David

_________________________________________
David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
--------------------------------------------\  http://dynamicDiagrams.com/
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Received on Tuesday, 4 March 1997 15:07:50 UTC