Subject: WG Review: Web Versioning and Configuration Management (deltav)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 1999 14:23:11 -0400

A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Applications Area.
The IESG has not made any determination as yet. 

The following Description was submitted, and is provided for
informational purposes only:

Web Versioning and Configuration Management (deltav)
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Description of Working Group:
 
This working group will define extensions to HTTP and the WebDAV
Distributed Authoring Protocol necessary to enable distributed Web
authoring tools to perform, in an interoperable manner, versioning and
configuration management of Web resources.

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, letting authors make changes
on the same resource at the same time, later merging together those
changes. 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 an important class of
complex information artifacts that benefit from the application of
configuration management.

The WebDAV working group originally focused on defining version
management capabilities for remote authoring applications. However, 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.

A sub-group of the WebDAV working group has developed functional
requirements for versioning and configuration management of Web
content. These requirements encompass the following capabilities,
which shall be considered by this working group:

IN-SCOPE:

* Naming and accessing resource versions and configurations

* Creating new revisions of a resource

* Placing a resource under version and configuration control

* Parallel development

* History retrieval

* Differencing

* Merging of revisions and configurations

* Operations on configurations

* Mapping resource versions and configurations to the URL namespace

* Versioning support for downlevel HTTP and WebDAV clients

Further information on these objectives can be found in the document,
"Goals for Web Versioning".

NOT IN SCOPE:

* HTTP server to server communication protocols

* Development process management, workflow, or change request management

* Versioning and configuration management via non-HTTP and WebDAV
  protocols.

* Implementation of functionality by non-origin proxies

Deliverables

The following documents are expected to form the final output of this
working group.

1. A goals document, which describes the high-level functional
   requirements for remote versioning and configuration management,
   including rationale.

2. A model document, which describes the semantics of versioning,
   configuration management, and parallel development in a
   protocol independent fashion.

3. A protocol specification, which describes new HTTP methods,
   headers, request bodies, response bodies, and WebDAV properties to
   implement the remote versioning and configuration management
   goals.

4. A traceability document, which describes the mapping between goals
   and protocol features.