Re: Overwrite:T behavior for COPY

On Thu, Dec 21, 2000 at 11:55:55AM -0500, Geoffrey M. Clemm wrote:
>...
> A third alternative was suggested at the recent IETF meeting
> by Roy Fielding, namely, that the "update" behavior was actually
> the behavior intended for COPY with Overwrite:T, so the

I've always viewed it this way, and consider the whole "DELETE first" thing
to be awfully pedantic.

>...
> Does anyone object to this third alternative?

Not me.

> In particular, note that this does result in different behavior when a
> collection is being copied.  In particular, the "delete" semantics
> removes members that are currently in the destination but do not have
> corresponding members in the source, while the "update" semantics does
> not remove any members, but only updates existing members and adds new
> members.

Not at all. If I want directory DA to overwrite directory DB, then the
result should look like directory DA. That means deleting the stuff that
wasn't in DA.

And to throw back some of your semantics :-) ... DA is a set of bindings.
That set overwrites the set in DB. Bang! There goes the spurious stuff that
was in DB. Theoretically, you don't even have to copy resources... just
adjust the bindings to the resources. :-)

[ yes, I tend to avoid the whole "directories are sets of bindings" view
  because it is a rather awkward viewpoint sometimes. but it is oh-so-fun to
  throw that back at people when they suggest a semantic that is
  non-intuitive :-) ]


Cheers,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/

Received on Friday, 22 December 2000 04:49:26 UTC