The 7 Deadly Sins of Versioning

Dear all,

As the WebDAV group is now preparing to consider versioning in detail, and
we will not be attending the meeting in June at Microsoft, David Durand and
I felt that our best contribution would be to record a list of possible
decisions that should be avoided for versioning on the WWW. We have thus
written a document, "The 7 Deadly Sins of Versioning (plus a venial one)",
that we would like to submit to the attention of the WEBDAV group.

The document is both attached here and available at:
http://www.cs.unibo.it/~fabio/webdav/7sins.html

Our experience is that there are large number of pitfalls ahead of us.
We've certainly fallen prey to some of them ourselves (as well as
occasionally falling prey to systems that have them). By arguing that these
items should be examined for avoidance, we intend to forestall
possbilities. This is not an accusation, but a mild warning. We hope that
our cautions and fears are considered exxagerated and pointless. The
reaction that would please us most, would be that everyone says "This is
all obvious. Why are they wasting our time with this stuff?"

Furthermore, we do not mean to provide answers to the problems we list.
Although we do feel that our VTML format, properly applied, would help
solve most of these problems, still we would like to avoid partisanship,
and concentrate on ensuring that the issues are fully discussed and then
dismissed.

Regards to all,

Fabio Vitali & David G. Durand

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 "I understand".
                                                             Kurt Vonnegut