Re: Configuration support

Jim Whitehead wrote:
> 
> Are there any members of the working group who strongly support adding a
> requirement for providing configuration support to WebDAV?
> 
> If you do, could you please give a brief description of your rationale?
> 

While I think supporting configurations would be a good thing, I'm
concerned that the 'WebDAV configuration model' may be difficult to
map to existing systems, each of which has a different idea of how 
configurations should be managed.  As Jim said, supporting
configurations 
will introduce a lot of complexity, regardless of which model is used.

Versioning is something that many servers would want to 
support, but configuration management may not be needed by some sites,
and the added complexity would be burdensome, so if WebDAV were to
support 
configurations, it would probably have to be optional.  Even for those
sites that would use the configuration support, most content editing
and management tools would probably only want to support simple
versioning
(checkout, checkin) anyway. Of course we're giving up some
interoperability
for more advanced tools, but I'm not sure that's critically important
yet.

As a maker and user of Configuration Management tools, I think
supporting
configurations would be great, but I think WebDAV can get away without
it,
and still provide a standard with a lot of value.


Bob Parker
Continuus Software Corp.

Received on Wednesday, 24 September 1997 22:37:46 UTC