Subject: RE: Reminder: WG Last Call on Ordered Collections

From: "Jim Whitehead" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 13:30:11 -0700

Geoff writes:
> The "principle of regularity" states that if a moved resource is moved to
> the end of the ordering in some cases, it is more regular for it
> to be moved to the end of the ordering in all cases, and not make the
> behavior dependent on whether the destination collection is the same as
> the source collection.
> For folks that expect regularity, it will be "less astonishing" for the
> behavior to be regular, and not special-cased in the way you suggest.

We actually have two logical operations hiding under the name "MOVE".
(a) One is a rename within a collection. (b) The other is a move (possibly
also with a rename at the same time) to another collection.

I don't think people would expect the same ordering behavior for (a) and
(b), since they view them as different logical operations.

- Jim

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From: "Julian Reschke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 4 May 2003 21:35:42 +0200

> From: [email-masked]
> [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of Jim Whitehead
> Sent: Friday, May 02, 2003 10:30 PM
> To: 'WebDAV'
> Subject: RE: Reminder: WG Last Call on Ordered Collections
>
>
>
> Geoff writes:

Well,

actually I *do* assume that MOVE behaves the same regardless the source
collection (and I assume so is Geoff).

To summarize: principles of "least surprise" or "regularity" do not seem to
help us here -- they can be used to argue for both positions. As this is
supposed to become a "proposed" standard only, we may want to delay this
decision in order to gather more implementation experience (as far as I know
currently there's only one single implementation). Therefore, my proposal is
to leave this specific point undefined. We'd then still need to decide
whether the spec should explicitly point out that the behaviour is
server-dependant.

Feedback appreciated.

Regards,

Julian

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

---

From: "Jim Whitehead" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 09:55:36 -0700

> Therefore, my proposal is to leave this specific point undefined.
> We'd then still need to decide whether the spec should explicitly
> point out that the behaviour is server-dependant.

There doesn't appear to be consensus on this issue, hence we should leave it
out of the spec.

That said, given that we had discussion on this issue, it makes sense to try
and capture some of that discussion in the specification, so that
implementors aren't operating in a total vacuum on this issue. Minimally,
the spec. should note that this behavior is intentionally undefined.

- Jim

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From: "Julian Reschke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 21:28:26 +0200

> Sent: Monday, May 05, 2003 6:56 PM
> To: 'WebDAV'

OK,

can anybody suggest a short paragraph summarizing the situation?

Regards,

Julian

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From: "Julian Reschke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 18:41:00 +0200

OK,

here's the text I added to resolve this issue:

"Note to implementors: this specification does not mandate a specific
implementation of MOVE operations within the same parent collection.
Therefore, servers may either implement this as a simple rename operation
(preserving the collection member's position), or as a sequence of "remove"
and "add" (causing the semantics of "adding a new member" to apply). Future
revisions of this specification may specify this behaviour more precisely
based on future implementation experience."

<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-webdav-ordering-protocol-latest
.html>

Jim, could you please issue the "immediate call for rough consensus"?

Julian

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