final(?) word till post-M2 (was: Re: URLs again)

On Sat, Feb 17, 2001 at 02:38:37AM -0600, B. W. Fitzpatrick wrote:
>...
> So my question for all of you is this:
>
> Why does the URL have to tell us where the repository begins? I

IMO, it doesn't and it shouldn't.

That said, read further. [I've thought of something earlier this evening,
and changed my position a bit]

> picture a scenario where we can have it both ways--the URL can be
> stored like this:
>
> http://www.lyra.org/who/knows/where/the/repos/begins/naaaah/foo.txt
>
> and our client can provide functionality like this:
>
> $ svn --where-does-the-repository-in-my-cwd-begin
> Your repository begins at repos/begins/naaaah
> Have a nice day.
> $
>
> Does that sound reasonable or am I missing something totally? This
> seems to meet the requirements of both sides well enough.

The above is actually needed. The WC *will* need to know the "canonical"
repository for a given URL.

Rationale: given http://www.webdav.org/projects/neon/ and .../mod_dav/, how
does the client know whether to start one or two commits? It *must* know
whether it is working against one or two repositories when committing a
given tree. (hostname and/or common path isn't sufficient)

Thus, the WC will internally have to record some kind of identifier or URL
or something for a repository so that it can determine whether FOO and BAR
do or do not come from the same repository.

However, the URL itself will not have that information. Only the server
(actually, the RA layer in conjunction with the server) can tell the WC
what repository is associated with any given resource.

So... my position regarding exposing repositories in URLs remains: they
shouldn't be exposed. However, I now believe the internal APIs will have
to have some knowledge about it.
[ not sure whether we break apart URLs, or whether the repository is an
  opaque ID, or whatever. doesn't matter right now ]

I'm going to put something into STACK as mark it as TBD. The work and design
will be deferred to post-M2.

Cheers,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/