Subject: Re: Locking: Implementation Considerations

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 20:28:15 -0400

GEoff, before you go on vacation, it would probably be valuable if you were your
own devil's advocate here....

<GC>
So what conclusion can one draw from all this?

One possibility is to say that locking is largely unneccessary in the
presence of versioning (after all, everything is read-only unless you
explicitly check it out into your workspace), so versioning servers
just won't bother with locking at all.  This would have an unfortunate
interoperability result on Class-2 clients try to work with versioning
servers.
</GC>
So why *NOT* let versioning replace locking?  Is there a form of locking that
provides value add over versioning?  How mature is the versioning work?   Be
your own devil's advocate...

<GC>
Another possibility is to downgrade Depth:infinity locking to a MAY,
thereby warning clients that they are likely to find this not supported,
and to turn the default lock into Depth:0, instead of Depth:infinity.
The latter will cause an interoperability issue with existing class-2
servers, but since there aren't many of those yet, if we move fast, this
would probably be OK.
</GC>
There must be issues with your first proposal or you wouldn't have offered this
one.  Let's hear them.  :-)

I just want to get your thoughts here before you go.  I'm sure we'll all be
discussing this while you're gone.

Cheers,

Jason.

---

From: "Geoffrey M. Clemm" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 09:35:14 -0400

From: [email-masked]

   <JC> Geoff, before you go on vacation, it would probably be valuable if you
   were your own devil's advocate here....

<gmc/> I always like a good debate, even with myself (:-).

   <gmc>

   </gmc>

   <JC> So why *NOT* let versioning replace locking?  Is there a form of
   locking that provides value add over versioning?

<gmc> Versioning is harder to provide than "simple single resource at
a time" locking (ssraat locking :-).  But ssraat locking is very
useful for various simple use cases (I'm working on these two resources
... I lock them while I'm doing so).  So I see a variety of clients
getting significant benefit out of ssraat locking, and it's nice and
lightweight for servers to implement (well, not so lightweight in the
presence of bindings, but still doable).

But if you extend locking to depth:infinity locking of collections,
the utility to clients drops dramatically.  It appears to work just
fine while there is just a single client (but then you didn't need to
lock in the first place).  But as soon as you get a few clients trying
to get work done, the simplicity of just "locking the whole
collection" when you want to work on some of the members inevitably
leads to gratuitous lockout.  Most of the resources locked by a
depth:infinity lock are commonly *not* ones you are going to change,
and even the usually harmless operation of adding a new member to a
collection is locked out.  Even worse, all the properties of those
members are locked as well.  In contrast sraat locking encourages the
client to just lock the resources they really expect to modify, so
when another client collides with the lock, you really are preventing
an overwrite situation.  Of course, a client could just walk the whole
collection and place depth:0 locks on every member, but at least we
aren't encouraging them to do so.

This argument so far is based solely on the dis-utility of
depth:infinity locking from a clients perspective.  Let's go devil's
advocate for a moment: "Then clients can simply just not use
depth:infinity locks if they have these bad effects."

But now lets look at it from a servers point of view (clearly the
devil needs a much better advocate than me :-).  To handle clients
that *do* chose to use depth:infinity locks (because they haven't yet
figured out how bad they are :-), you still have to pay the price of
implementing them.  The added complexity of lock-null and
depth:infinity is likely to significantly *decrease* the
interoperability of clients and servers, both because some servers
will consciously cut various corners and because the of the high
likelihood of servers handling edge cases differently.

Now lets add in the presence of versioning (note that all the preceding
arguments apply irrespective of the existence of versioning support).
You now have workspaces that share common revisions but that have their
own "working resource" for resources that are being modified in that
workspace.  Ssraat locking works just fine, since the lock is being
applied to the resources being modified (i.e. the checked-out working
resources).  On the other hand, depth:infinity locks apply to all the
*shared* revisions, effectively locking out key versioning operations
(such as labeling) on all the shared resources.

So in summary, the argument is that depth:infinity provides marginal
utility for locking-only clients, provides significant cost/complexity
for locking-only servers, decreases interoperability due to this
cost/complexity, and is incompatible with versioning.

   <JC/> How mature is the versioning work?  Be your own devil's
   advocate...

<gmc/> Even if we had no plans of ever producing a versioning
protocol, I'd still be against depth:infinity locking and lock-null
resources.  (And thus he adroitly dodges the request to denigrate
the versioning work :-).

   <gmc>
   </gmc>

   <JC/> There must be issues with your first proposal or you wouldn't have
   offered this one.  Let's hear them.  :-)

<gmc/> Actually, that was just a pre-emptive strike in case someone
came up with some convincing reasons why they just had to have
depth:infinity locking.  I don't have any, and I'd rather just
simplify the spec (i.e. the first proposal), so the second proposal is
(in my view) just an inferior alternative proposal.

Cheers,
Geoff