- From: Brian Korver <briank@xythos.com>
- Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2003 14:55:49 -0800
- To: "'WebDAV'" <w3c-dist-auth@w3.org>
On Wednesday, March 5, 2003, at 12:21 AM, Julian Reschke wrote: >> Julian, >> >> I agree, but I think it's even worse than this. Semantically, >> MOVE is merely a simple namespace operation, but in practice >> it may be more than that. For instance, a move across unix >> filesystems must be implemented as a recursive copy (followed >> afterward by delete). > > Brian, > > in the Unix API, you don't move at all -- you link() then unlink(). > "mv" is > just a user command that does it's best when the files reside in > different > partitions. I think WebDAV MOVE should just fail if the resource cannot > really be moved (preserving all dead & live properties), and fail > otherwise. > Just like in the Unix API, the caller *then* can decide to do a > COPY/DELETE > instead. > > Julian Julian, If it is the goal to have WebDAV implement the semantics of the Unix API, then I would prefer that it more closely model those semantics -- for instance by making DELETE fail on non-empty collections. Personally, I don't think that WebDAV should implement the semantics of the Unix API, at the very least because of the overhead -- imagine having to issue a DELETE for every resource in order to delete a collection containing a million files. I feel that WebDAV should implement semantics that are closer to the Unix CLI, which of course was designed to be easier on the fingers (read: "lower overhead") than the API. -brian briank@xythos.com
Received on Friday, 7 March 2003 02:53:46 UTC