I will work on Delta-V

Hi Keith,

I had a chance to talk to Geoff Clemm today about the Delta-V BOF in Oslo,
and the concerns you raised there about whether there are enough people
willing to work on a Web versioning and configuration management protocol.
I'm sure it will come as no surprise to you that I both firmly believe there
should be a Delta-V working group, and that I intend to work to help this
group reach its goals. I decided not to attend the Oslo IETF meeting
primarily due to the high cost in time and money of attending, not due to
any lack of interest or intent to work on the subject.

As you know, versioning support has been part of WebDAV's vision from the
very first WebDAV BOF in San Jose in Fall 1996.  Beyond merely being the "V"
in WebDAV, I see versioning as a key capability for supporting remote teams
working collaboratively to develop complex information artifacts like Web
sites, software systems, network protocols, and clusters of related XML
documents.  The Delta-V protocol will provide the ability for Web-based
authoring tools to access a spectrum of compatible versioning servers that
span a variety of document management, configuration management, file
system, and Web portal repositories.  It also promises a clear migration
path for client applications that want to add cross-platform versioning
support, leading to a time when versioning support is a native capability of
the majority of editing tools.

It may not be evident from the outside, but the people already working on
the Delta-V design are of world-class caliber.  Geoff Clemm is on the
program committee of the Software Configuration Management (SCM) workshop
series, the best peer-reviewed venue for publication of work on versioning
and software configuration management, and has published several important
papers in the field.  Chris Kaler, Bradley Sergeant, and Jeff McAffer are
all senior engineers who have had lead roles in the design of their
companies' respective CM repositories.  David Durand recently finished his
Ph.D. on how to do within-document versioning for wide-area non-lock-based
collaboration.  Jim Amsden has deep knowledge on how software development
environments employ CM, while Bruce Cragun has similarly deep knowledge on
the use of versioning in his document management system.

With the contributions of the entire mailing list leveraging this extremely
talented core group, I have significant confidence that the Delta-V effort
will develop an interoperability protocol that is of the highest technical
quality, of which the IETF can be proud.  Furthermore, by developing a key
infrastructure for versioning and configuration management, this protocol
will further the long-held goal, first pursued with FTP and email, of making
the Internet itself a platform for collaborative work.

I encourage you to approve the Delta-V charter, and to work with us to
achieve our goal of improving the document collaboration facilities of the
Internet.

- Jim Whitehead

Received on Tuesday, 20 July 1999 00:00:23 UTC