- From: Jim Whitehead <ejw@ics.uci.edu>
- Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 13:45:49 -0800
- To: WEBDAV WG <w3c-dist-auth@w3.org>
- Cc: Versioning <ietf-dav-versioning@w3.org>
One characteristic of the IETF which distinguishes it from other standards development organizations is the IETF requires its working groups to have finite lifespans, and to close after its work has been complete. This is motivated by a desire not to have working groups keep expanding their mission to self-perpetuate, and to ensure that the working group doesn't get "stale" with the same cast of characters rehashing the same issues. Now, I don't think the WebDAV working group has fallen into any of these traps yet -- we continue to make good progress on the versioning protocol, and the advanced collections protocol. We haven't strayed from our original charter. Now that the WebDAV Distriubted Authoring protocol has been approved, we're starting to see lots of public announcements by companies of their WebDAV product plans (see http://www.webdav.org/projects/). There is also increasing interest in open source development of WebDAV applications, significantly helped by Greg Stein's webdav.org site. All these are signs of robust health. So, you might ask, if it ain't broke, why fix it? Well, one good reason is that Keith Moore, our Applications Area advisor thinks the time is right. But, more generally, I look at it as a case of preventative medicine. By creating a separate versioning working group, with its own separate charter, several positive goals are accomplished: * It sends a signal that new people can become involved and participate. While it's always the case that new people can get involved in an IETF effort, it's often difficult to know when you can get involved without annoying people who have been working on the topic for awhile. For example, Mark Anderson's comments on draft-ietf-webdav-protocol-09 last fall were well intentioned, but had terrible timing. * It provides the opportunity to refresh the agreement over what work is being done. Most people on the mailing list today didn't have a chance to discuss the original WebDAV charter. Even if there is common agreement that the charter of the versioning working group should continue in the same vein as current efforts, it still is worthwhile to make sure that *current* list members agree with the goals. * It forces people to explicitly subscribe to a new mailing list. Though it may seem funny to list this as a positive, working group mailing lists tend to attract a lot of lurkers over time, people who want to track an effort rather than being an active participant. You might be surprised to know that the WebDAV mailing list now has appx. 350 people on it! Obviously you're not all active participants :-) (Although I very much appreciate having such a large pool of people to call on for volunteers for various activities). By causing people to reaffirm their interest by joining a new list, it tends to "refresh" the membership. * It allows the burden of work to be more evenly shared. This one is more of a personal motivation, but it does impact the working group as a whole. The motivation and ability to participate of the hardest working people in a working group is hard to sustain over several years, and it's good to have some rotation of duties. If too much is asked of the same people for too long, the working group suffers immensely when they, inevitably, are no longer able to participate any longer. Many of you know that I have been working towards my Ph.D. degree while being chair of WebDAV. And, truth be told, my participation has definitely delayed my graduation. I have no regrets -- this has been an excellent experience, the kind of activity I wanted to be able to work on during grad. school. Plus, interacting with members of the working group has been very rewarding, both professionally and personally. Still, I'm at least a year away from graduation if I have complete focus on my degree, and I need to get more of WebDAV off my plate to do this. So, while I still intend to continue on as chair of the WebDAV working group, working to finish up advanced collections, and work on issues from the issues list, and resolve any interoperability problems that may arise, I intend that the efforts on versioning and advanced collections will form new working groups. I will not chair those new groups, though I will help form them, and make sure they get a good start. My goal is to create continuity from the current WebDAV working group into the new working groups, to make sure none of the momentum we have is lost. There is successful precedent for this in the DASL working group, which has been making steady progress towards defining a searching protocol for DAV resources (http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/dasl/). DASL shows the strength of creating a new working group -- it has a different set of people working on it than who developed the base WebDAV protocol, people who have deep searching experience. Their mailing list collected people who had interest in the searching problem, helping ensure that their discussions are focused, and not lost in other topics on the main DAV list. DASL is the right model for what the working groups on versioning and access control can accomplish. At the bottom of this message is a proposed charter for the versioning working group, which I have tentatively named "DELTA-V" (you know, to emphasize they're creating extensions to DAV -- "delta" -- and are working on the "V" part of DAV. :-) I'd appreciate any comments you have on the charter -- send them to the main WebDAV list. You can also expect to see another charter in the near future to develop an access control working group, but I don't have this one done yet. I look forward to working with you to develop these new working groups, and to setting the stage for the completion of the original WebDAV goals, creating a writeable, versioned collaborative Web. - Jim --------------------------------------- Web Versioning and Configuration Management (DELTA-V) Chair(s): TBD (Though Jim Whitehead emphatically declines to be chair) Applications Area Director(s): Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu> Patrik Faltstrom <paf@swip.net> Applications Area Advisor: TBD, probably Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu> Mailing Lists: General Discussion: ietf-dav-versioning@w3.org To Subscribe: ietf-dav-versioning-request@w3.org Subject: subscribe Archive: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-dav-versioning/ Description of Working Group: xThis working group will define extensions to HTTP and the WebDAV Distributed Authoring Protocol necessary to enable distributed Web authoring tools to perform, in an interoperable manner, versioning and configuration management of Web resources. Versioning, parallel development, and configuration management are important features for remote authoring of Web content. Version management is concerned with tracking and accessing the history of important states of a single Web resource, such as a standalone Web page. Parallel development provides additional resource availability in multi-user, distributed environments, letting authors make changes on the same resource at the same time, later merging together those changes. Configuration management addresses the problems of tracking and accessing multiple interrelated resources over time as sets of resources, not simply individual resources. Traditionally, artifacts of software development, including code, design, test cases, requirements, help files, and more have been a focus of configuration management. Web sites, comprised of multiple inter-linked resources (HTML, graphics, sound, CGI, and others), are an important class of complex information artifacts that benefit from the application of configuration management. The WebDAV working group originally focused on defining version management capabilities for remote authoring applications. However, it has become clear that while versioning functionality alone is useful for a range of content authoring scenarios involving one, or a small set of resources, versioning alone is insufficient for managing larger sets of content. Protocol support for parallel development and simple remote configuration management of Web resources provides functionality for managing larger sets of interrelated content developed by multiple users at different locations. A sub-group of the WebDAV working group has developed functional requirements for versioning and configuration management of Web content. These requirements encompass the following capabilities, which shall be considered by this working group: IN-SCOPE: * Naming and accessing resource versions and configurations * Creating new revisions of a resource * Placing a resource under version and configuration control * History retrieval * Differencing * Merging of revisions and configurations * Operations on configurations * Mapping resource versions and configurations to the URL namespace * Versioning support for downlevel HTTP and WebDAV clients Further information on these objectives can be found in the document, "Goals for Web Versioning". NOT IN SCOPE: * HTTP server to server communication protocols * Versioning and configuration management via non-HTTP and WebDAV protocols. * Implementation of functionality by non-origin proxies Deliverables The final output of this working group is expected to be two documents: 1. A goals document, which describes the high-level functional requirements for remote versioning and configuration management, including rationale. Jim Amsden, IBM, is editor of this document. 2. A model document, which describes the semantics of versioning, configuration management, and parallel development in a protocol independent fashion. Editor: TBD 2. A protocol specification, which describes new HTTP methods, headers, request bodies, response bodies, and WebDAV properties to implement the remote versioning and configuration management goals. Chris Kaler, Microsoft, is editor of this document. Goals and Milestones: Since significant work on remote versioning and configuration management has already taken place within the WebDAV working group, the following schedule is a reasonable estimate of the remaining effort, despite the scope of the working group. Jun 99 (Specification, Goals, Model) Produce drafts of distributed versioning and configuration management protocol specification, as well as the goals and requirements documents. Submit as Internet Draft. Jul 99 (Meeting, Specification, Goals, Model) Meet at Oslo IETF and hold working group meeting to review the protocol specification, goals, and model document. Oct 99 (Goals) Create final version of distributed versioning and configuration management goals document. Submit for approval as Informational RFC. Oct 99 (Specification, Model) Produce revised model document, and distributed versioning and configuration management protocol specification. Submit both as Internet Drafts. Nov 99 (Meeting, Specification, Model) Meet at Washington, DC IETF and hold working group meeting to review the model document and the distributed versioning and configuration management protocol specification. Feb 00 (Specification, Model) Submit revised model document, and distributed versioning and configuration management specification as Internet Drafts. Mar 00 (Meeting, Specification, Model) Meet at Adelaide IETF and hold working group meeting to review the model document and distributed versioning and configuration management protocol specification. Apr 00 (Specification, Model) Submit revised model document and distributed versioning and configuration management specification as Internet Draft. Hold working group last call for comments on both drafts. May 00 (Specification, Model) Revise model document and distributed versioning and configuration management specification based on working group last call comments, and submit both documents to the IESG for approval as a Proposed Standard RFC.
Received on Tuesday, 9 February 1999 16:56:41 UTC