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Re: Re (2): Subversion and DeltaV ?

From: Ben Collins-Sussman <sussman_at_red-bean.com>
Date: 2006-09-21 13:46:11 CEST

On 9/20/06, edgar@edgarschwarz.de <edgar@edgarschwarz.de> wrote:

> > Book chapter about interoperabliity:
> > http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn.webdav.html
> Read before. Not that much information in it.

Other than the fact that it says:

"mod_dav_svn is not a fully-implemented DeltaV server. Many portions
of the DeltaV specification were irrelevant to Subversion, and thus
left unimplemented. [...] There is still some debate in the developer
community as to whether or not it's worthwhile to remedy either of
these situations. It's fairly unrealistic to change Subversion's
design to match DeltaV, so there's probably no way the client can ever
learn to get everything it needs from a general DeltaV server. On the
other hand, mod_dav_svn could be further developed to implement all of
DeltaV, but it's hard to find motivation to do so—there are almost no
DeltaV clients to interoperate with."

>
> > > - Does it make sense at all to talk to subversion with a DeltaV client ?
> > Not really. The subversion server only implements a teensy portion of
> > the deltaV spec.
> I looked around a little bit and found something about Jakarta Slide and Catacomb
> concerning DeltaV capabilities.
> But they don't look much better than mod_dav_svn. Only different.

There's a huge difference between Slide/Catacomb and Subversion. The
former products are actually *trying* to be DeltaV servers, and I
think Slide even claims to be a full server that is nearly entirely
compliant with the specification. Have you tried it? (Subversion,
however, just happens to use some parts of DeltaV to get its work
done, and is mostly a bunch of proprietary REPORT protocols.)

> Nevertheless I would like to give SVN a try because I already have a server up
> and running.
> When I access mod_dav_svn with TortoiseSVN and Apache2 on XP and do some versioning
> I find some rather complex sequences of MKACTIVITY, PROPFIND, CHECKOUT, MERGE, ...

Yes, and I already gave you a link that explains what those sequences mean:

http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/notes/webdav-protocol

> in apaches access.log. But naturally I only see the request method and url.
> Any simple method to also get the request bodies ?
> Who specified these sequences ?
> - Is there some mod_dav_svn spec how DeltaV concepts are mapped to subversion ?

The link above is more specific, but here's a very very old verbal
description of some concepts:

http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/www/webdav-usage.html

> - Or is it a client thing and I must ask the tortoise people ?
> - If absolutely necessary I could have a look at some source code or sniff the
> network. But I would like to avoid this.

The first link above even describes the 'custom' REPORT methods, which
make up the bulk of the subversion protocol.

It's not entirely clear to me what you'd like to accomplish with your
generic DeltaV client. Maybe you can be more specific...

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Received on Thu Sep 21 13:46:27 2006

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