On Wed, Jul 04, 2001 at 12:39:00PM -0400, Jacob Smullyan wrote:
>...
> Subversion's use of WebDAV/DeltaV would seem to be at odds with the idea that
> the current client library is a black box implementation. Otherwise, why
> use a standardized protocol? There's no point in learning French if you
> don't want to speak it with anyone.
We use a standardized protocol because:
* it beats having to take time to design our own
* we get to use cool stuff like Neon and Apache/mod_dav
* broad knowledge -- people don't have to learn SVN specific protocols
That said, we use a very specific subset on the client and server. That is:
the client expects the server to support specific features, and it has no
fallbacks to other strategies. The server supports just enough to let the
client operate, but no more; asking for the other features will fail in
various ways.
*Someday*, we will support more breadth, and that will mean more
interoperability. *Today*, a client can use DeltaV to speak to the server
(and avoid use of any SVN libraries). But they will need to operate very
similarly to how the client does it today.
[ btw, to other people reading: Jacob and I discussed a bunch of this at
length a while back. he is already quite familiar with our approach. my
discussion here is a public recap. (and yes, I asked Jacob to bring
further DAV-related SVN discussions here, so that more people can stay
abreast of the DAV issues ]
> Of course, the subversion client is a reference implementation, and wrapping
> it will often be a good idea. But it seems desirable for a deltav client to
> be possible that could support Subversion and other deltav servers with a
> single code base (allowing for a manageable number of individual peculiarities
> in server implementation, of course).
Definitely doable. As long as those clients understand that the SVN server
is very limited, and expects the client to operate in a pretty specific
pattern.
Cheers,
-g
--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
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Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:33 2006