BugZilla issue 213, PROPFIND:infinity

Hi,

(see <http://ietf.cse.ucsc.edu:8080/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=213> for 
history).

We discussed this issue during today's conference call, and the 
remaining issue seems to be:

If a server decides not to implement or support PROPFIND/Depth:infinity, 
is it allowed to do that generally (meaning that any 
PROPFIND/Depth:infinity request will be rejected independently of 
whether the resource at the request-URI is a collection, or the 
collection happens to be "small"), or is it required to first check that 
the Request-URI indeed identifies a collection, and the full collection 
contents is indeed to expensive to return?

I think the former represents what servers do today, and this means 
clients can't rely on PROPFIND/Infinity support in any way. As a matter 
of fact, I think clients cope with that already, and there's really no 
problem in just stating this (AFAIK, Apache/moddav is shipping 
configured that way).

Requiring servers to check whether the resource is a collection, and to 
decide on whether it would be too expensive to do seems like an 
unrealistic requirement, because it may be almost as expensive as 
executing the PROPFIND.

Feedback appreciated,

Julian

Received on Friday, 3 February 2006 21:10:04 UTC