One document matched: draft-ietf-webdav-version-goals-00.txt
WebDAV Working Group J. Stracke, Jim Amsden
INTERNET DRAFT Netscape, IBM
draft-ietf-webdav-version-goals-00 February 24, 1999
Expires August, 1999
Goals for Web Versioning
Status of this Memo
This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with
all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that
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progress."
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Distribution of this document is unlimited. Please send comments to
the Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) working group at
ietf-dav-versioning@w3.org, which may be joined by sending a
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ietf-dav-versioning-request@w3.org. The main WebDAV mailing list at
w3c-dist-auth@w3.org may also be used for comments. To join the
mailing list, send a message with subject "subscribe" to
w3c-dist-auth-request@w3c.org. Discussions of the WebDAV versioning
working group are archived at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-dav-versioning/. Discussions
of the WebDAV working group are archived at
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Abstract
Versioning and configuration management are important features for
controlling the evolution of remotely authored Web content. Parallel
development leverages versioning capability to allow multiple authors
to simultaneously author Web content. These functions form a basis for
flexible, scaleable distributed authoring. This document describes a
set of scenarios, functional, and non-functional requirements for
web versioning extensions to the WebDAV protocol. It supersedes the
versioning-related goals of [WEBDAV-GOALS].
Contents
GOALS FOR WEB VERSIONING 1
Status of this Memo 1
Abstract 2
Contents 2
Introduction 2
Definitions 4
Scenarios 7
Goals 17
Rationale 29
Non-goals 30
Security Considerations 31
References 31
Introduction
Versioning, parallel development, and configuration management are
important features for remote authoring of Web content. Version
management is concerned with tracking and accessing the history of
important states of a single Web resource, such as a standalone Web
page. Parallel development provides additional resource availability
in multi-user, distributed environments and lets authors make changes
on the same resource at the same time, and merge those changes at some
later date. Configuration management addresses the problems of
tracking and accessing multiple interrelated resources over time as
sets of resources, not simply individual resources. Traditionally,
artifacts of software development, including code, design, test cases,
requirements, help files, and more have been a focus of configuration
management. Web sites, comprised of multiple inter-linked resources
(HTML, graphics, sound, CGI, and others), are another class of complex
information artifacts that benefit from the application of
configuration management.
The WebDAV working group originally focused exclusively on defining
version management capabilities for remote authoring applications and
group consensus on these features is reflected in [WEBDAV-GOALS].
However, as the WebDAV working group has constructed protocols for
versioning functionality, it has become clear that while versioning
functionality alone is useful for a range of content authoring
scenarios involving one, or a small set of resources, versioning alone
is insufficient for managing larger sets of content. Protocol support
for parallel development and simple remote configuration management of
Web resources provides functionality for managing larger sets of
interrelated content developed by multiple users at different
locations. This document contains a set of scenarios and a list of
the functional and non-functional goals for versioning, parallel
development, and configuration management of Web resources. It
replaces the existing functional goals for versioning capability
described in [WEBDAV-GOALS], section 5.9. These scenarios and goals
are used to develop a model of WebDAV versioning, which in turn is
used to develop the protocol that implements it.
Version management is always a tradeoff between the goals for maximum
data integrity, maximum data availability, and ease of use. It is
relatively easy to specify a design that satisfies any two of these
goals, but this is often at the expense of the third. For example,
data availability and ease of use are easy to accomplish using
authoring servers that compromise data integrity by following a last
writer wins policy. In contrast, high data integrity and availability
are possible using branch and merge systems, but at the cost of ease
of use due to difficult merges. The requirements for WebDAV versioning
are based on compromises between these conflicting goals. WebDAV
versioning specifies a set of mechanisms that can be exploited to
support a variety of policies allowing client applications and users
to find a balance appropriate to their needs.
Definitions
1. A basic resource is a resource that is not a collection or
reference, i.e., an HTTP/1.1 resource.
2. A versioned resource is an abstraction for a resource which is
subject to version control, a resource having a set of revisions,
relationships between those revisions, revision names, and
named branches that track the evolution of the resource.
3. A revision is a particular version of a versioned resource. An
immutable revision is a revision that once created, can never be
changed without creating a new revision. A mutable revision is
a revision that can change without creating a new version.
4. A working resource is an editable resource derived from a revision
of a versioned resource by checking out the revision. A working
resource can become a new revision, or overwrite an existing
mutable revision on check in.
5. A initial revision is the first revision of a versioned resource
and has no predecessors within the versioned resource.
6. A revision name is a unique name that can be used to refer to a
revision of a versioned resource. There are two types of revision
names, revision identifiers or labels as described below.
7. A revision identifier (or revision ID) is a revision name which
uniquely and permanently identifies a revision of a versioned
resource. Revision identifiers are assigned by the server when
the revision is created and cannot be changed later to refer to
a different revision.
8. A label is a revision name which uniquely, but not necessarily
permanently identifies a revision of a versioned resource. A label
may be assigned to a revision, and may be changed to refer to
a different revision at some later time. The same label may be
assigned to many different versioned resources.
9. A predecessor of a revision is a revision from which this revision
is created. A successor of a revision is a revision derived from
this revision. A revision may have one predecessor and multiple
successors. The is-derived-from relationships between revisions of
a versioned resource form a tree.
10. The merge-predecessors of a revision are those revisions that have
been merged with this revision.
11. A revision history is a concrete representation of the elements of
a versioned resource including all predecessor and successor
relationships, revision names, activities, etc.
12. A line-of-descent is a sequence of revisions connected by
successor/predecessor relationships from the initial revision to
a specific revision.
13. An activity is a resource referring to a named set of revisions
that correspond to some unit of work or conceptual change.
Activities are created by authors and are used to organize related
changes to resources, and to provide a basis for parallel
development and merging concurrent changes to the same resource.
An activity can contain revisions of multiple versioned resources,
and/or multiple revisions of the same versioned resource along a
single line-of-descent. In each activity, it is possible to refer
to the latest revision of a versioned resource in that activity.
14. A workspace is a resource that is used to determine what revision
of a versioned resource should be accessed when the resource is
referenced without a particular revision name. When a user agent
accesses a versioned resource, a workspace may be specified to
determine the specific revision that is the target of the request.
A workspace contains a version selection rule that is applied when
the workspace is used in conjunction with the URI for a versioned
resource to perform URL mapping and select a specific revision.
15. A revision selection rule specifies what revision of a versioned
resource should be selected. WebDAV defines selection rules that
allow a revision to be selected based on its checked out
status, revision name, activity name, configuration name, or the
latest revision. Servers may support additional selection rules.
16. A conflict report lists all revisions that must be merged when an
activity is merged into a workspace. If the merge source activity
specifies a resource that is a predecessor or successor
of the revision selected by the current workspace, then there is
no conflict. The merged workspace will pick the revision already
in the workspace if the merge source specifies a predecessor,
otherwise it will pick the successor specified by the merge
source. Conflicts result when the merge source activity picks a
revision on a different line-of-descent than that selected
by workspace. Conflicts are resolved by merging resources together
into the workspace. This creates a new revision that has multiple
predecessors and contains the changes from both merge source and
the current workspace revisions.
17. A configuration is a named set of related resources where each
member refers to a specific revision of a versioned resource. A
configuration is a specific instance of a set of versioned
resources. Configurations are similar to activities, but play a
different role. A workspace with its current activity and version
selection rule specifies what a client can see. An activity is
associated with work in progress and encapsulates a set of
related changes to multiple versioned resources. Creating
separate activities allows developers to work in parallel on the
same resources, and to reconcile conflicts through merging
activities. Configurations represent a persistent selection of
revisions of versioned resources for organization and
distribution. Configurations can be versioned resources,
activities cannot.
Scenarios
This section provides an example usage scenario that provides a
context for explaining the definitions above, and for exploring and
validating the goals given in the rest of this document. The example
consists of a fictitious company, Acme Web Solutions that is
developing a typical Web e-business application. To provide for the
broadest coverage, the scenarios start with a non-existent resource
typical of web applications, and follow its life cycle through
development and multiple deployments. Other resources would likely
have similar life cycles.
Acme Web Solutions (AWS) has developed a web-grocery store called WGS.
The application consists of a number of HTML pages, some Java applets,
some Java Server Pages (JSP) and a number of Java servlets that access
a DB2 database. AWS has decided to develop a new generation of its
flagship WGS product to include maintenance of customer profile
information, and active (push) marketing of product specials to
interested customers using Channel Definition Format (CDF). The new
product will be called Active Grocery Store or AGS. Customers who are
interested in receiving information on specials will indicate that
interest by subscribing to various CDF channels targeting pre-defined
or user-specified product groupings. Since AGS represents significant
new revenue potential for grocery stores, AWS has decided to sell it
as a separate product from WGS, and at a relatively high price. WGS
will still be available without AGS as a lower-cost, entry-level
solution for smaller stores, or stores just getting into e-business
solutions.
AGS is a typical Web application development project that will require
changes to existing resources in AWS as well as adding new resources.
These new resources will also be HTML pages, applets, JSPs, servlets,
etc. WGS is an active project sold to current customers with a
maintenance contract. It has on-going updates that are unrelated to
the new AGS system, but may need to be included in the AGS system.
These include bug fixes or minor new functional improvements. Since
AGS is based on WGS, but both can evolve and be sold separately, it is
necessary to maintain versions of resources used by both. This will
require AWS developers to specify a configuration of versioned
resources corresponding to each product. As the products evolve over
time, these configurations will be versioned resources themselves,
each representing a new release of their associated product, WGS, AGS,
or both.
The AWS development organization consists of a large number of
developers across a variety of disciplines including webmasters, Java
developers, relational database developers, HTML page editors,
graphics artists, etc. All of these developers contribute to the
development of the WGS and AGS products, often working in parallel on
the same resource for different purposes. For example, a WGS
developer may be editing an HTML page to fix a usability problem
while an AGS developer is working on the same page to add the new AGS
functions. This will require coordination of their activities to
provide maximum availability of these shared resources while at the
same time ensuring the integrity of the updates. The AWS development
team has decided to allow parallel development and resolve multiple
concurrent updates through branching and merging of the resource
version graph. This adds complexity to the development project as
well as some risk due to inaccurate merges, but AWS has decided it
cannot be competitive in the Web world if all development must be
serialized on shared resources as this would significantly slow
product development.
The following scenarios trace the life cycle of a typical Web resource
from conception to product deployment and maintenance. Each scenario
exposes some aspect of WebDAV and its use of the versioning, parallel
development and configuration management definitions and goals
specified in this document. In the scenarios below, it is assumed that
all developers have access to a Web WorkBench (WB) application that
provides client access to a WebDAV server called DAVServer. It is
further assumed that both the client and server provide level 2 WebDAV
services plus advanced collections, versioning, parallel development,
and configuration management.
There is a goal that WebDAV versioning will support perhaps multiple
levels of versioning from none (existing WebDAV specification), simple
linear versioning, support for parallel development, and through to
configuration management. The scenarios below should follow this
progression from simple to complex in order to help expose logical
points for leveling the protocol functionality. However, the intent of
this document is to at least expose the complete goals for full WebDAV
versioning support in order to ensure down-levels are a consistent
subset. The exact contents of down-level servers and the number of
levels will be determined later during protocol development.
Resource Creation
The AGS project team held a design meeting to determine the work
products required to support the AGS project, its integration with
the WGS application, and to assign these work products to developers.
Various analysis and design techniques can be used to discover the
required work products, but this is beyond the scope of WebDAV. At the
end of the meeting, webmaster Joe was assigned to develop the new
welcome page, index.html, for the AGS project. This page will be the
initial page used to navigate the AGS application, and is the first
page seen by users. It is a new page that will not replace the WGS
welcome page, but will contain a reference to it.
Joe uses WB to create a new collection, http://aws/ags/, and the new
index.html page in the collection http://aws/ags/index.html. Neither
the parent collection, nor index.html are versioned resources at this
point. A WebDAV MKCOL is used to create the collection, and a PUT is
used to create the initial, empty resource.
Resource Editing
Joe uses WB to GET the resource and edit it with his favorite HTML
editor. Each save by the HTML editor does a PUT to the DAVServer,
overwriting its current contents. No new versions are created.
Joe may also use WB to get and set properties of index.html using
PROPFIND and PROPPATCH. Joe does not need to lock index.html because
he is the only developer working on it at this time. He could however
lock the resource to ensure no one else could make any changes he is
not aware of.
Creating a Versioned Resource
At some point, Joe decides preliminary editing on index.html is
complete, and he needs to make a stable version available to other
developers who need it for integration testing, etc. Joe however
wants to ensure that no other developers make changes to index.html
that he cannot back out, as he is the webmaster responsible for the
resource. So Joe uses the WB to make index.html which causes
DAVServer to create a versioned resource, and make the initial
version Joe's index.html. At this point, Joe's index.html is
immutable, it cannot be changed by anyone, including Joe, and remains
in the repository until the versioned resource is deleted.
Labeling a Version
When DAVServer created the versioned resource corresponding to
index.html, it gave the initial version a revision id, "102847565".
This revision name is automatically assigned by the server, and
cannot be changed or assigned to any other version. This revision
name acts as the unique identifier for this version of versioned
resource index.html. The AGS development team has decided that a
revision label "initial" will identify the initial version of all
resources. This ensures they stand out and can be easily accessed
without remembering some opaque revision id. Joe uses WB to set the
label on the initial version to "initial" in order to identify the
version with this more meaningful name.
Accessing Versioned Resources
Fred wants to access Joe's initial version of index.html. So he uses
URL http://aws/ags/index.html to get the contents of the resource and
notices he does get the right version, because it was selected by the
default workspace. That is, when Fred accessed URL
http://aws/ags/index.html, he did so without specifying a workspace.
So the default workspace was used, and the default workspace always
uses "latest" in its version selection rule. But Fred wants to be
more cautions. He wants to be sure that he continues to get version
labeled "initial", even if the latest version changes as the result
of new changes Joe may check in. So Fred creates a workspace called
"initialws", and sets the version selection rule to be the revision
labeled "initial". Then Fred always accesses index.html with its URL
and the initialws workspace to be sure he gets the specific version
he needs. The workspace also ensures he gets the revision named
"initial" of all other versioned resources as well, ensuring a
consistent set of revisions.
Later that week, there have been a number of changes to index.html,
and Fred wants to just take a quick look at an old version to remember
how the page used to look. Fred’s workspace is currently selecting
the latest version, and he doesn’t want to change his workspace just
to look at some other revision. So Fred uses his WebDAV client to
access index.html using label "initial", or revision id 32345
to override the workspace selection and get the initial revision.
Creating a New Revision
A week later, a number of developers have noticed that index.html is
missing both important references to their pages as well as hot
images for navigation. They send email to Joe specifying their new
requirements. Joe now wants to make changes to index.html and create
a new revision. He wants to retain the old revision, just in case the
requirements he was given were incorrect and need to be backed
out, and to allow developers using the old revision to continue their
work. To do this, Joe uses the WB to check out index.html and create
a new working resource. Joe can now access the working resource
because working resources are always visible from the workspace in
which they were checked out.
As before, Joe uses the WB and HTML editor to GET the working
resource and PUT updates. Each PUT replaces the contents of the
working resource with changes made by the HTML editor, no new
revision is created. When Joe is finished making edits to support
the new requirements, he checks the working resource back in, making
a new revision.
Editing a Mutable Revision
John was assigned to write a high level marketing document, ags.html
that provided an overall description of the AGS application. Since
most changes to this document have no effect on the rest of AGS, John
decides to allow revisions of ags.html to be editable in-place. This
is so simple spelling and grammar errors can be fixed without
requiring the creation of a new revision. John still wants to create
revisions whenever some significant new feature is added to AGS so
the old descriptions are available to customers who don't upgrade.
John creates resource ags.html, edits it a number of times, and then
checks it in to create a versioned resource.
Later on, a new feature is added and John checks out ags.html to
create a new revision, makes his edits, and checks it back in,
creating a new revision. Three days later, John notices a spelling
mistake in the first revision that he corrected in the new revision,
but users of the old revision would like the correction made for
their users too. So John again checks out the old revision creating a
new working resource, fixes the spelling mistake, and then checks
the working resource back in. However in this case, John selects
check in in-place in order to overwrite the old revision with the
corrected revision. Now all users of the old revision will see the
correction. This revision is now marked as mutable since it
has been changed.
Six months later, there have been a number of complaints about
ags.html presenting misleading product information that has resulted
in unhappy customers. There's even talk of lawsuits. So John hurriedly
updates ags.html and checks in the new version as immutable so that in
case there is a suit, he can prove that customers had access to his
updated version. Now any changes can be made by creating new
immutable revisions without ever worrying about loosing old version.
A year later, things have cooled down, and John decides its OK to
allow mutable revisions again. On his last change he checked ags.html
in as a mutable revision allowing subsequent changes to be done
without creating new versions. At the same time, the revision history
of the immutable revisions is preserved just in case that pesky
customer re-appears.
Parallel Development with Activities
Two weeks later, there is a major redesign of AGS that results in a
lot of changes to index.html. Again, Joe checks out the resource
creating a new working resource. But it is taking Joe a long time to
finish all the edits, and in the meantime, graphics artist Jane wants
to update index.html with references to the new images that resulted
from the AGS redesign. Jane attempts to check out index.html, but WB
informs her that Joe already has it checked out and refuses the
request. She checks with Joe, and since they are both working on
different aspects of index.html, Joe feels it would be fine for Jane
to do her work in parallel with his, and then he will merge her
changes with his to finish the required updates. Jane creates a new
activity called "images_updates", uses it to set the activity of her
workspace, and again attempts the checkout. This time the checkout
succeeds, and a new working resource is created for index.html in
the images_updates activity. Now any changes that Jane makes to
images.html are completely independent of changes Joe makes to the
same resource, but in a different activity. Note that Joe did not
create an activity when he checked out index.html. Instead, the
default activity "mainline" was used. Jane couldn't checkout
index.html without specifying a different activity because a
resource can only be checked out once in a given activity. She also
couldn’t make any changes until the resource is checked out as
checked in revisions are read-only.
After making her edits, she checks index.html back in, which creates a
new revision in the images_updates activity.
Merging Activities
Project management practice dictates that at various times during the
development project, usually every few days or at specific project
milestones, the updates from any parallel activities should be merged
in order to integrate the changes and produce instances of the
products suitable for testing. This avoids the risk of revisions of
shared resources diverging wildly, and thereby decreases the
likelihood of difficult or inaccurate merges. It also encourages
communication within the development organization and avoids
"big-bang" integration points late in the development cycle. This
enhances the stability of the products and helps ensure a
deterministic, controllable development process. It also allows early
product testing and better feedback to developers.
Joe has finally finished his changes to image.html, and is ready to
incorporate the changes from Jane’s images_update activity to get the
new images. Before doing so, Joe checks his updates into revision
"r0.2" so if he does something wrong when doing the merge, he can
recover and try again. Now Joe specifies in his workspace that he
wishes to merge the "image_updates" activity into his workspace. He
then can obtain a conflict report from his workspace that indicates
that the resource index.html requires a merge. He then issues a merge
request for index.html. This checks out the resource in the mainline
activity (the activity in Joe's workspace), and registers a merge
from the latest revision in the image_updates activity to the working
resource. This working resource now has two predecessors, r0.2
and the image_updates revision. Joe then uses the differencing
capability in his HTML editor to find the differences between his
revision and Jane’s, and to apply Jane's changes as appropriate.
The HTML editor Joe uses is WebDAV versioning aware, and does a 3-way
merge by accesses the closest common ancestor in the revision history
in order to help with the merge process. Joe notices that most of
Jane’s changes do not conflict with his as they are in different
places in the resource, but there are a number of places where he
added new functions that do not have images as Jane didn't know they
were there. He notes these and either fixes them himself, or sends
email to Jane so she can fix them in another revision. Once the
changes are complete, Joe checks in the merged revision. Jane is free
to continue making updates in her image_updates activity, and these
changes can be merged in again later.
Creating a Configuration
At some point, enough of the work products of the AGS application are
sufficiently complete and stable that AWS wants to distribute an alpha
release. To do this, Joe uses WB to create a configuration named
"alphaRelease" that will contain a consistent set of compatible work
product revisions. This configuration will contain all revisions
currently selected by Joe's workspace. If any working resources
exist in Joe's workspace, the request to create a configuration fails,
with an error message indicating that the failure is due to the
presence of checked-out resources in Joe's workspace.
When Jane is ready to see the alphaRelease, she modifies the revision
selection rules of her workspace to select this new configuration.
Any conflicts between this new configuration and her current activity
requiring merges would be noted in the "conflicts" report of her
workspace, which Jane could then resolve with the "merge" operation.
Each release of AGS consists of new resources and updated revisions of
existing resources. To simplify creating a new configuration for each
new release, Joe can make the AGS configuration a versioned resource.
For release 1 of AGS, Joe uses a configuration called AGS, and labels
it R1. For release 2, he checks out version R1 of configuration AGS,
and adds, removes, or changes the revisions of versioned resources in
the configuration, then checks in the configuration and labeling it
R2.
Getting the Revision History of a Versioned Resource
In order to determine what revision should be included in the
alphaRelease configuration, Joe must examine the revision history of
resource index.html. He does this by requesting the revision history
of index.html and receives an XML document describing all the
revisions including their revision id, labels, descriptions,
successors, predecessor, and merge predecessors. Joe uses an XML
enabled browser and an XSL style sheet to view the revision history.
Accessing Resources by Non-versioning Aware Clients
Fred belongs to a different company, and does not have any WebDAV
versioning aware tools. However, he is an excellent graphics artist,
and has been asked to look over a particular image file, logo.gif. So
Fred uses his image editing tool to get a copy of logo.gif. Because
his editing tool is not versioning aware, he cannot specify a
particular version, either with a revision name or by using a
workspace. However, the WebDAV server provides a default workspace
that selects the latest revision when no label or workspace is
specified on a request.
Updating Resources by Non-versioning Aware Clients
Fred has provided his review to Jane and Joe, and they decide he
should be allowed to update the image in logo.gif. Fred then edits
the image in his image editing tool, and attempts to save it on the
DAVServer. Again, the editing tool does not specify a workspace, or
activity, nor can Fred check out the resource before attempting the
save. Joe realizes Fred must be able to change the resource, so he
enables automatic versioning in logo.gif. Then when Fred attempts to
update the resource, the server automatically checks out the resource,
does the put, and then checks it back in, all in the context of the
default workspace.
If someone else had the resource already checked out, then Fred's
save would have failed because the automatic check out would have
failed.
There are some potential problems with using non-versioning aware
clients this way. If Fred got a copy of the resource, and then Jane
checked it out, made changes, and then checked it back in, when Fred
does his save, Jane's changes will be lost. The changes will appear
in a previous revision, but they may have been in the same activity,
and there would be no indication that a merge needs to be done in
order to pick up both changes. To avoid this problem Joe could change
the activity in the default workspace so that all changes done by
non-versioning aware clients are done in a separate activity. This
would allow Joe to control when these changes were merged back into
other activities.
Freezing an Activity
Joe has decided that the imageUpdates activity should no longer be
used once all the changes in that activity have been merged into the
mainline activity. To enforce this, Joe locks the activity. Then when
Jane attempts to edit index.html in her imageUpdates activity, the
checkout fails as the activity is locked.
Preventing Parallel Development
Joe is responsible for another resource, getPreferences.shtml that he
wants complete control over. He does not want to allow anyone else to
ever make changes to this resource in any activity. To enforce this,
Joe indicates getPreferences.shtml does not support multiple
activities, and he checks it out to make sure no-one else can make
any changes. Then when Jane attempts to checkout getPreferences.shtml
in the imageUpdates activity, the checkout fails indicating that
resource does not support parallel development.
Goals
This section defines the goals addressed by the protocol to support
versioning, parallel development, and configuration management. These
goals are derived from the desire to support the scenarios above.
Each goal is followed by a short description of its rationale to aid
in understanding the goal, and to provide motivation for why it was
included.
1. Versioning aware and non-versioning aware clients must be able to
inter-operate. Non-versioning aware clients will not be able to
perform all versioning operations, but will, at a minimum, be
capable of authoring resources under version control and be
capable of creating new revisions while implicitly maintaining
versioning semantics. Non-versioning aware clients are
HTTP/1.1 and versioning unaware WebDAV clients.
Versioning and configuration management adds new capabilities to
WebDAV servers. These servers should still be responsive to
non-versioning aware clients in such a way that these clients
retain their capabilities in a manner that is consistent with the
versioning rules, and the capabilities those clients would have had
on a non-versioning server. For example, non-versioning aware
clients should be able to GET the contents of a versioned resource
without specifying a revision and get some well-defined default
revision. A non-versioning aware client should be able to PUT to a
versioned resource and have a new revision be automatically
created. The PUT must be done by doing an implicit checkout, PUT,
and checkin in order to maintain versioning semantics and avoid
lost updates. A subsequent GET on the same versioned resource by
this client should return the new revision. The server should be
able to be configured so that these non-versioning aware client
updates are placed in a different activity, or perhaps disallowed.
2. It must be possible to version resources of any media or content
type.
The versioning semantics of the protocol must not depend on the
media type of the resource or versioning would have limited
applicability, and client applications would become more
complex.
3. Every revision of a versioned resource must itself be a resource,
with its own URI.
See section 5.9.2.2 of [WEBDAV-GOALS]. This goal has two
motivations. First, to permit revisions to be referred to, so that
(for example) a document comparing two revisions can include a link
to each. Second, revisions can be treated as resources for the
purposes of DAV methods such as PROPFIND.
4. It must be possible to prevent lost updates by providing a protocol
that reserves a revision of a resource while it is being updated
and preventing other users from updating the same revision at
the same time in uncontrolled ways.
5. It must be possible to reserve the same revision more than once at
the same time, and to have multiple revisions of the same versioned
resource reserved at the same time.
6. It should be possible for a client to specify meaningful labels to
apply to individual revisions, and to change a label to refer to a
different revision.
Although the server assigns unique revision IDs, human-meaningful
aliases are often useful. For example, a label called "CustomerX"
could be assigned to the latest revision of a document which has
been delivered to customer X. When X calls to inquire about the
document, the author(s) can simply refer to the label, rather than
maintaining a separate database of which revisions have been
shipped to which customers.
7. It must be possible to use the same label for different versioned
resources.
This allows authors to indicate that revisions of different
resources are somehow related or consistent at some point in time.
Configurations formalize this relationship.
8. The labels and revision IDs within a revision history are names in
a common namespace, in which each name must be unique. The server
may partition this namespace syntactically, in order to distinguish
labels from IDs. The server enforces uniqueness for these labels.
This means the same label cannot apply to multiple revisions, the
same revision ID cannot apply to multiple revisions, and no label
can also be a revision ID or vice versa. This is required so
that a label, when applied to a versioned resource, refers to one
and only one revision, and all revision names for a versioned
resource are unique. To enforce uniqueness, a server will have to
reject labels that it might eventually use as revision IDs. The
simplest way to do this is to partition the namespace.
9. Given a URI to a versioned resource, and a revision name, it must
be possible for a client to obtain a URI that refers to that
revision, and to access the revision.
This allows specific revisions of a resource to be accessed given
the URI of the versioned resource and a revision name.
10. Given a URI to a versioned resource, and a workspace, it must be
possible for a client access the revision selected by the
workspace.
When a user agent accesses a versioned resource, it is necessary
to provide additional information to specify which revision of
the versioned resource should be accessed. One way to do this is
to specify a revision name with the resource URL to select a
particular revision as specified in the previous goal. However,
this requires users to add and remember a label for each revision,
which is inconvenient and does not scale. In addition, labels
alone don’t provide a way of accessing revisions modified in an
activity, or contained in a configuration. It is possible
to specify a number of different ways of accessing specific
revisions using different headers for labels, activities,
configurations, working revisions, etc., but this leads to a lot
of complexity in the protocol, and for users. Workspaces provide
a unified means of specifying how URLs are mapped to specific
revisions. A workspace contains a revision selection rule that
is applied when the workspace is used in conjunction with the
URLs for versioned resources to perform URL mapping to select
a specific revision. This allows specific revisions of a many,
related revisions to be accessed through URLs without having to
specify a specific label for each resource. It also provides a
means to resolve URLs to particular revisions using more complex
revision selection rules than a single label including revisions
modified in an activity or contained in a configuration.
11. Relative URLs appearing in versioned documents (e.g., HTML and
XML) which are being edited and/or browsed by a versioning-aware
client should work correctly.
Web resources and client applications often refer to other
resources with relative URLs, an incompletely specified URL that
is completed by pre-pending some known context that would
not contain a revision or workspace name. When used with
versioned resources, these relative URLs may be relative to a
versioned resource or a particular revision. In this case, the
context must include sufficient information for the relative URL
to be resolved to a specific revision.
12. If the DAV server supports searching, it should be possible to
narrow the scope of a search to the revisions of a particular
versioned resource.
It is often the case that one needs to find, for example, the
first revision at which a particular phrase was introduced, or
all the revisions authored by a particular person. Given search
capabilities for collections, it would be far more sensible to
leverage those capabilities than to define a separate search
protocol for revision histories. For example, if the server
supports [DASL], then the revision histories could be searched
via DASL operations.
13. If the DAV server supports searching, revision IDs and label
names should be searchable.
This would allow client applications to search for resources that
have a particular revision name. This goal does not specify that
any particular search mechanism is implied or needed. It only
indicates that labels should be available properties that a
search mechanism could access.
14. The CM protocol must be an optional extension to the base
versioning protocol.
It is expected that servers will want to support versioning
without supporting configuration management. This goal provides
the required flexibility.
15. It must be possible to determine what properties of a checked in
revision may change without creating a new revision. Properties
of a checked in revision that cannot change are called
immutable properties.
It is anticipated that some properties may be calculated in such
a way that their values may change even on a revision that is
checked in. Other properties may change without having any
effect on the resource itself e.g., review status, approved, etc.
This results from the fact that properties may be meta-data about
a resource that is actually not describing the state of the
resource itself. A client must be able to discover which
properties might change in order to maintain its state properly.
16. Revisions are either mutable or immutable. Once an immutable
revision has been checked in, its contents and immutable
properties can never be changed. A mutable revision can be
checked out, updated, and checked back in without creating a new
revision. It must be possible to determine if a revision is
mutable or immutable, but the mutability of a revision cannot be
changed once it has been checked in.
The concept of mutable revisions is included to support typical
document management systems that want to track version histories
while allowing more flexible, less formal versioning semantics.
Mutable revisions will have some restrictions due to the fact
that because the revision may change, certain configuration
management semantics cannot be maintained. For example, a
mutable revision cannot be a member of a configuration because
the configuration would not represent a persistent set of
revisions.
17. Each revision may have properties whose values may be changed
without creating a new revision. The list of these properties
must be discoverable.
It is expected that certain live properties whose values are
calculated by the server may depend on information that is not
captured in the persistent state of an immutable revision. The
values of these properties may change from time to time without
requiring a new revision of the versioned resource. There may
also be some DAV properties used to support versioning and
configuration management that may change without requiring a
new revision.
18. Revisions and versioned resources can be deleted. Generally this
is a high-privilege operation. Deleting a revision must update
its predecessors’ successors.
This goal is included to support generally necessary maintenance
operations on versioning repositories. It is sometimes the case
that successors of a revision beyond some point are no longer
required and can be removed from the repository to reclaim space.
It may also be the case that a versioned resource is no longer
used and can be safely deleted. This goal does not intend to
express any policy for when or under what circumstance revisions
can be deleted. It only provides a mechanism to support particular
client or server policies.
19. Once a revision has been deleted, its ID cannot be reused within
the same versioned resource.
In many cases, it is necessary to be able to guarantee (as far as
possible) that one can retrieve the exact state of a resource at
a particular point in history, and/or all the states which the
resource has ever taken on. For example, if a company is sued
for violating a warranty that the plaintiff read on the company’s
Web site, it might be useful to be able to prove that the
warranty never contained the provision that the plaintiff says it
did. Conversely, it may be useful for the plaintiff to be able to
prove that it did. A revision history where all revisions were
immutable would provide this sort of ability.
Of course, DAV cannot preclude the possibility of an out-of-band
method to change or delete a revision; an implementation may
provide an administrative interface to do it. But such access
would at least be limited to trusted administrators.
It is possible that a versioned resource contained in a
configuration is deleted, and a new, unrelated versioned resource
is created using the same URL, and having the same revision id.
The configuration may incorrectly include this revision.
Requiring revision Ids to be UUIDs would resolve this issue.
20. A configuration can only contain immutable revisions.
This requirement is included in order to retain the usual semantics
of configurations, and to ensure that a configuration can always be
recreated. The implication is that unversioned resources, working
revisions, and mutable revisions cannot be members of a configuration.
21. It must be possible to query a revision history to learn the
predecessors and successors of a particular revision, activity
names, the initial and latest revisions, etc.
If a client wishes to present a user interface for browsing the
revisions of a particular versioned resource, it must be able to
read the relationships represented within the version history.
22. It should be possible to obtain the entire revision history of a
versioned resource in one operation.
A client wishing to display a map of the revision history should
not have to make queries on each individual revision within the
revision history. It should be able to obtain all the information
at once, for efficiency's sake.
23. The protocol support for parallel development through activities
must be an optional capability.
Activities support controlled parallel development on the same
resource, but results in the need to merge multiple changes at
some later time. This introduces work and the potential for
errors that some servers may want to avoid by requiring updates
to be serialized.
24. The protocol must support the following operations:
1. Creating and accessing revisions:
- Create a versioned resource from an unversioned resource
and set its initial revision to the contents of the
unversioned resource. This does not imply that unversioned
resources are required. A server could create all resources
as versioned resources.
- Obtain the URI of, or access a revision or a versioned
resource given the URL for the versioned resource and either
a revision name, or a workspace
- Check out a revision in an activity and create a working
resource
- Check in a working resource and create either a new revision
or update the existing revision in place creating a mutable
revision
- Cancel a checkout (delete a working resource)
- Describe a revision with human-readable comments
- See if a resource is versioned
- Get the versioning options for a resource
2. Labels:
- Apply a label to a particular revision
- Change the revision to which a label refers
- Get all the revision names on a particular revision
- Get the revision history of a resource
3. Activities:
- Create and name an activity
- Checkout a revision in an activity
- Merge an activity into a workspace
- Generate and maintain the conflict report for a merge
- Get a list of the resources modified in an activity
- Apply a label operation to all resources modified in an
activity
4. Configurations:
- Create a configuration
- Add/remove revisions from a configuration
- Access a revision given a configuration name that contains
it by using a configuration in a version selection rule for
a workspace
- Delete a configuration.
- Determine the differences between two configurations by
listing the activities in one and not the other.
Some of these operations come from [WEBDAV-GOALS], section
5.9.1.2. Not all of the operations in that section are
replicated here; some of them (e.g., locking) fall out
naturally from the fact that a revision is a resource.
The protocol must find some balance between allowing
versioning servers to adopt whatever policies they wish with
regard to these operations and enforcing enough uniformity to
keep client implementations simple and interoperable.
25. For each operation that the protocol defines, the protocol must
define that operation's interaction with all existing [WebDAV]
methods on all existing WebDAV resources.
This goal applies to all HTTP extensions, not just versioning.
However, versioning, parallel development, and configuration
management are sufficiently complex and have a broad enough
effect on other methods to call out this goal specifically.
26. The protocol should clearly identify the policies that it
dictates and the policies that are left up to versioning system
implementers or administrators. A client must be able to discover
what policies the server supports.
Many writers have discussed the notion of versioning styles
(referred to here as versioning policies, to reflect the nature
of client/server interaction) as one way to think about the
different policies that versioning systems implement. Versioning
policies include decisions on the shape of version histories
(linear or branched), the granularity of change tracking, locking
requirements made by a server, naming conventions for activities
and labels, etc.
27. A client must be able to determine whether a resource is a
versioned resource, or whether a resource is itself revision of a
versioned resource.
A resource may be a simple, non-versioned resource, a versioned
resource, an immutable revision, a mutable revision, or a working
resource. A client needs to be able to tell which sort of resource
it is accessing.
28. A client must be able to access a versioned resource with a
simple URL and get some well-defined default revision.
The server should return a default revision of a resource for
where no specific revision information is provided. This is one
of the simplest ways to guarantee non-versioning client
compatibility. This does not rule out the possibility of a server
returning an error when no sensible default exists.
It may also be desirable to be able to refer to other special
revisions of a versioned resource. For example, there may be a
current revision for editing that is different from the default
revision. For a graph with several branches, it may be useful to
be able to request the tip revision of any branch.
The association of a workspace with a particular user agent for
the purposes of applying version selection rules is the
responsibility of the client application. The server does not
necessarily maintain this association.
29. It must be possible, given a reference to a revision of a
versioned resource, to find out which versioned resource that
revision belongs to.
This makes it possible to understand the versioning context of
the revision. It makes it possible to retrieve a revision history
for the versioned resource to which it belongs, and to browse
the revision history. It also supports some comparison operations:
It makes it possible to determine whether two references designate
revisions of the same versioned resource.
30. Versioning functionality may be partitioned into levels. The
lowest level must provide simple versioning of resources and
support for labels, checkin, and checkout. Other functions should
be as orthogonal as possible so that servers have additional
flexibility in choosing features to implement. Functionality at
lower levels must be a consistent subset of the functionality at
higher levels and not introduce special cases, incompatible, or
redundant functions.
Servers must provide all the functions defined for a given level
in order to claim and advertise conformance to that level. A
server may choose to implement additional features from higher
levels to support particular business and/or client requirements.
The OPTIONS method indicates exactly what features are supported
while the DAV header indicates the supported level clients can
rely on.
31. It must be possible to lock an activity so that no one can make
further changes in that activity.
32. It must be possible to indicate that a particular resource does
not allow parallel development. That is, the resource can
effectively only be checked out in one activity.
33. The protocol should be defined in such a way as to minimize the
adoption barriers for clients and existing repository managers.
This includes integration with legacy data in repository
managers supporting the WebDAV protocol.
34. The server must not require client applications to retain state
in order to support versioning semantics. That is, a user must be
able to begin using versioning with one client, and continue
using versioning on some other client at some other time.
35. It must be possible to discover what resources have changed in a
workspace from a given point.
Rationale
Versioning in the context of the worldwide web offers a variety of
benefits:
1. It provides infrastructure for efficient and controlled management
of large evolving web sites. Modern configuration management
systems are built on some form of repository that can track the
revision history of individual resources, and provide the
higher-level tools to manage those saved versions. Basic versioning
capabilities are required to support such systems.
2. It allows parallel development and update of single resources.
Since versioning systems register change by creating new objects,
they enable simultaneous write access by allowing the creation of
variant versions. Many also provide merge support to ease the
reverse operation.
3. It provides a framework for coordinating changes to resources.
While specifics vary, most systems provide some method of
controlling or tracking access to enable collaborative resource
development.
4. It allows browsing through past and alternative versions of a
resource. Frequently the modification and authorship history of a
resource is critical information in itself.
5. It provides stable names that can support externally stored links
for annotation and link-server support. Both annotation and link
servers frequently need to store stable references to portions of
resources that are not under their direct control. By providing
stable states of resources, version control systems allow not only
stable pointers into those resources, but also well defined
methods to determine the relationships of those states of a
resource.
6. It allows explicit semantic representation of single resources
with multiple states. A versioning system directly represents the
fact that a resource has an explicit history and a persistent
identity across the various states it has had during the course of
that history.
Non-goals
These non-goals enumerate functionality that the working group has
explicitly agreed to exclude from this document. They are documented
here for explanatory purposes.
1. Revisions in multiple revision histories (see [WEBDAV-GOALS],
sections 5.9.1.3 and 5.9.2.5). This capability was felt to be too
rarely useful.
2. Federated revision histories (that is, revision histories which
are not stored on a single server). This capability would
introduce great difficulties. A server implementer who needs it
can use out-of-band server-to-server communication. But, this
communication is arguably out of the scope of WebDAV, which is a
client-to-server protocol.
3. Client-proposed version identifiers (see [WEBDAV-GOALS], section
5.9.2.8). Labels do the job better.
4. Change management or change control operations. It is envisioned
that policies for change management and the mechanisms to implement
them will be quite variable for the number and types of users
authoring content for the web. Therefore it is important to provide
core capabilities for versioning, parallel development, and
configuration management without hindering the policies client
applications may choose to present to their users. It is intended
that WebDAV versioning will provide these core capabilities, and
that a variety of change management policies could be implemented
on these core capabilities by client applications.
5. Server-to-server communication (e.g., replication) is not required.
Security Considerations
To be written. It is likely that implementing features to meet the
goals described here will present few or no new security risks beyond
those of base DAV. One possible exception is that it may become more
difficult to hide the contents of a resource when there may exist
other versions with different access control lists.
References
[WEBDAV]Y.Y. Goland, E.J. Whitehead, Jr., A. Faizi, S.R. Carter,
D. Jensen, "Extensions for Distributed Authoring on the World Wide
Web -- WEBDAV", Internet-Draft draft-ietf-webdav-protocol-10. Nov.,
1998
[WEBDAV-GOALS] J. Slein, F. Vitali, J. Whitehead, D. Durand,
"Requirements for a Distributed Authoring and Versioning Protocol
for the World Wide Web", RFC-2291. February 1998.
[WEBDAV-ACP] J. Slein, J. Davis, A. Babich, J. Whitehead,
"WebDAV Advanced Collections Protocol", Internet-Draft
draft-ietf-webdav-collection-protocol-02.txt. Nov., 1998.
[DASL] S. Reddy, D. Jensen, S. Reddy, R. Henderson, J. Davis,
A. Babich, "DAV Searching & Locating",
Internet-Draft draft-reddy-dasl-protocol-04.txt. Nov., 1998.
[CVS] http://www.cyclic.com/cyclic-pages/books.html
[BONSAI] Mozilla.org, http://www.mozilla.org/bonsai.html
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