RE: Delete, Move, and Copy for References (Yaron's Issue #9)

That's what I get for working for MS too long. Lost all my UNIX skills.

Far from me to argue with precedent without a killer reason, pending new
revelations consider my objection to copies of direct references by RFC 2518
clients resulting in copying the target rather than the reference removed.

				Yaron


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Geoffrey M. Clemm [mailto:gclemm@tantalum.atria.com]
> Sent: Saturday, February 27, 1999 6:21 AM
> To: Yaron Goland
> Cc: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Delete, Move, and Copy for References (Yaron's Issue #9)
> 
> 
>    From: Yaron Goland <yarong@microsoft.com>
> 
>    What really scares me is a scenario where I have a 
> directory filled with
>    references but I'm using an RFC 2518 client. If I copy the 
> directory I will
>    go from a directory that took up a few kilobytes (just to 
> record the
>    references) to one of any random and potentially huge 
> size. The source
>    directory ate 30Kb and the destination eats up 6 Gig. I 
> would call that
>    surprising.
> 
> What really scares me is when I create a copy, and it turns 
> out that it's
> not really a copy, so every change I make to the copy trashes 
> my original.
> Apparently we're scared by different things.
> 
>    I would also invoke precedent here. In every system I have 
> ever heard of
>    that supports references (read: links) a COPY always 
> copies the link not the
>    destination. I would be very hesitant to go against three 
> decades of
>    accumulated experience without a good reason.
> 
> So you've never even *heard* of Unix?  If you're looking for 
> decades of
> experience with links, you might want to consider it.
> 
> Every Unix system I've ever used (and I've used *a lot*), 
> copy by default
> the target of both hard and soft links, not the link itself.  This is
> try for both "cp" and "tar".
> 
> So I agree with your appeal to precedent, but I suggest you drew the
> wrong conclusion.  Among the various reasons why the link target is
> copied by default, is that any relative links outside of the
> collection you are copying will break if you just copy the link
> itself.  Converting the link to an absolute link to work around this
> would be even worse.
> 
>    Hence I believe that the default action should be 
> no-passthrough on COPY.
> 
> I could live with either one, but I'd be careful about going against
> three decades of precedent that says otherwise (:-).
> 
> Cheers,
> Geoff
>

Received on Saturday, 27 February 1999 20:00:32 UTC