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INTERNET-DRAFT Jim Amsden, IBM
draft-ietf-webdav-version-goals-01.txt Chris Kaler, Microsoft
J. Stracke, Netscape
Expires December 26, 1999 June 26, 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 other groups
may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet- Drafts as reference material
or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt
The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html.
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].
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Table of Contents
1 INTRODUCTION ...........................................2
1.1 Definitions .........................................4
1.2 Storyboards .........................................6
1.3 Goals ..............................................14
1.4 Rationale ..........................................23
1.5 Non-goals ..........................................24
1.6 Security Considerations ............................25
1.7 References .........................................25
1.8 Open Issues ........................................25
1 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.
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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.
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1.1 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.
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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
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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.
18. The checkout paradigm is the process by which updates are
made to versioned resources. A resource is checked out
thereby creating a working resource. The working resource is
updated or augmented as desired, and then checked in to make
it part of the version history of the resource.
1.2 Storyboards
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
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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.
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1.2.1.1 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.
1.2.1.2 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.
1.2.1.3 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.
1.2.1.4 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
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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.
1.2.1.5 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.
1.2.1.6 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
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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.
1.2.1.7 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
overwriteable. 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.
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1.2.1.8 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.
1.2.1.9 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
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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.
1.2.1.10 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.
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1.2.1.11 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.
1.2.1.12 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.
1.2.1.13 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.
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1.2.1.14 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.
1.2.1.15 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.
1.3 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-
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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. 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.
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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
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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.
At a minimum, the following actions are actions are available at
the basic level:
. Checkout a revision and receive a way to update the working
copy
. Checkin a working copy to create a new revision
. Cancel an active checkout
. Optional for server to support multiple checkouts on the same
resource
. Labeling of revisions to identify them
. Access to the linear checkin history of a versioned resource
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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.
36. Versioned resources, revisions, and activities must have an
associated URN that is globally unique.
37. Servers may choose to support only mutable revisions, only
immutable revisions, or both. Clients must be able to discover
the support provided by the server.
38. Activities should be able to be dependent (conceptually
include) other activities.
39. Enumeration of versioning resource types should be fast/easy.
1.4 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
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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.
1.5 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. However, the
protocol shouldn't do anything to preclude federated version
histories at a later date.
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
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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.
1.6 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.
1.7 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
1.8 Open Issues
. The current write up of configurations may need to change as we
define what a "configuration" is.
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