Re: LOCKS_SHOULD_THEY_USE_AN_IF_HEADER_TO_VERIFY vs RFC2518bis-05

Jason Crawford wrote:

> The old way of overloading If seems pretty lame.   Can't new clients do 
> both?

Agreed, but it works (if it ain't broke, don't fix it). Why are we 
adding completely new requirements for both servers and clients with the 
inevitable interoperability issues if the present protocol does what 
it's supposed to do?

> Can't new servers detect which approach in being used?

They could, if we clearly define how. So far we haven't.

> I wouldn't require servers to support the old way.  Supporting the old 
> way is common sense but at some point we should encourage the movement 
> to the new approach.

Well, that would break Microsoft Office. I don't think people will be 
very interested in a spec revision that doesn't work with it.

IMHO the only thing we should say is that LOCK without a request body 
*with* an If header will refresh all locks on the resource identified by 
the request URI (possibly deprecating the use of the Time-Out request 
header here -- I don't think there's a strong use case for changing the 
timeout after the lock already exists; and as far as I know existing 
servers do not support it anyway).

Best regards, Julian

-- 
<green/>bytes GmbH -- http://www.greenbytes.de -- tel:+492512807760

Received on Wednesday, 2 June 2004 10:26:54 UTC