RE: Versioning goals doc

Larry,

> In HTTP, a variant may or may not be a separate resource. However,
> for the purpose of WebDAV, I would propose that any variant than
> can be authored independently must be a separate resource.
>
> There are a variety of cases for variants. The most common case
> for variants in use in the web today seems to be to have different
> variants of the page depending on which version of browser your
> User-Agent string reports. Other variants may depend on other
> factors. Content may 'vary' on any of a variety of request headers.
>
> The design of versioning needs to account for the relationship
> of versions of a resource and versions of its variants for
> all of the cases of uses of variants. Since there are several
> cases, a case analysis is necessary. You've analyzed only
> one of the cases.

Your last paragraph sounds like a good requirement statement. Has this been
discussed at all in the versioning group. The reason I ask this is because I
am confused about earlier discussions on configurations and change sets in
the context of this requirement. I can see two inter related ways of dealing
with the variant requirement that you express. It involves using
configurations and derivations to address this problem. Therefore, I am
surprised that earlier discussions on versioning mentioned configurations as
an optional requirement. If configurations indeed are optional requirements,
it seems to me that the above also might be an optional requirement.

Sankar

Received on Wednesday, 30 September 1998 11:42:13 UTC