Re: Name space munging ... blech!
Jim Whitehead (ejw@ics.uci.edu)
Tue, 11 Jun 1996 23:40:30 -0700
> http://host/dir/projectX/file.c
>*and*
> http://host.dom/VERSION/1.5/dir/projectX/file.c
>
>put the versions at the beginning; make a version-aware server deal
>with "VERSION/*" either as a CGI that fetches the appropriate
>version or whatever.
I'm not clear on the semantics of this approach. From your URL, it appears
that "VERSION" appears as a constant string, immediately followed by the
version number in the next hierarchy down. Is this correct?
If so, I'm not terribly fond of this approach. To date we have been mostly
dealing with how to handle labeling of the version of leaf nodes in a
heirarchy. However, the general case for configuration management is that
there is a heirarchy of versioned collections of versioned resources.
Ideally, what is needed to handle this is a naming mechanism like:
http://foo.bar.com/top;version=rev_2.0/middle;version=14.2/leaf;version=5.5
Unfortunately, the URL specification at present does not allow parameters
to be included in each level of the heirarchy.
This could be translated into a heirarchical namespace as follows:
http://foo.bar.com/VERSION/rev_2.0/top/VERSION/14.2/middle/VERSION/5.5/leaf
However, in my last post I showed the problems inherent in this approach
(i.e., the assumption that everything leaf referrs to using relative URLs
must also be version 5.5). Also, in this approach, "5.5" is clearly not a
collection, but is the version of the leaf resource.
The alternative is to reverse your initial proposal:
http://foo.bar.com/top/VERSION/rev_2.0/middle/VERSION/14.2/leaf/VERSION/5.5
This might actually work, although I find it to be much less elegant, and
more susceptable to namespace collisions than using the ";version=" format.
- Jim