Subject: [Bug 78] New: Value of ETag and getlastmodified properties on multiple bindings

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 10:08:44 -0800

http://ietf.cse.ucsc.edu:8080/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=78

           Summary: Value of ETag and getlastmodified properties on multiple
                    bindings
           Product: WebDAV-BIND
           Version: -latest
          Platform: Other
        OS/Version: other
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: 03. Properties
        AssignedTo: [email-masked]
        ReportedBy: [email-masked]
         QAContact: [email-masked]

Issue: The Bind specification is currently silent on how consistent live
properties, including ETag, must be across bindings.  

This has been discussed somewhat on the list but no agreed-upon language added
yet.  The behavior of servers here affects greatly how bindings-aware clients
might implement synchronization.  It's very similar to the interoperability
problems that have plagued the WebDAV community over whether the last-modified
date and etag should change when the properties of a resource are changed with
PROPFIND so we should avoid a similar ambiguity in the case of bindings.

Proposed Text:  "The ETag and Last-Modified date values refer to the state of
the resource, not the state of any or all bindings.  Thus, the ETag, the
Last-Modified date and the value of the 'DAV:getetag' and 'DAV:getlastmodified'
properties MUST NOT vary according to which binding is used to access the resource."

Some discussion on the list recently included the notion that since some servers
use the URL as part of the ETag, this requirement cannot be made.  I don't agree
with that personally because implementing the Bind specification requires far
more changes than simply how ETags might be generated.  Certainly there are
successful implementations which use another method to generate ETags which does
not suffer from variance according to URL, and those methods can be emulated.

However, should the WG conclude that this requirement cannot be made or met,
then the Bind specification still needs to include text specifying that the
value of the ETag MAY vary across bindings, and whether the value of
last-modified MUST be the same.

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