Subject: DELTA-V Working Group Update

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 16:32:21 -0400

Welcome to the new WebDAV DELTA-V working group! DELTA-V was formed to 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. I would like to thank
all the people who have already contributed to the versioning specification, and
inspirit them to continue their valued input. I would also like to welcome
anyone who is interested in versioning, configuration management, support for
multi-user, distributed parallel development, document management systems, and
web authoring to join the DELTA-V working group and put your mark on the 'V' in
WebDAV. The discussion list for DELTA-V is at [email-masked]. To
join the discussion list, and the working group, send an email with "Subject:
subscribe" to [email-masked].

You can find a copy of the DELTA-V charter at
http://www.webdav.org/deltav/charter.txt. We have some strawmen documents that
will let this working group hit the road running. First, there the versioning
goals document at
http://www.webdav.org/deltav/goals/draft-ietf-webdav-version-goals-01.txt. This
document augments the scenarios and goals of the original WebDAV scenarios with
items specific to distributed, multi-user versioning and configuration
management. These goals and use cases were then used to construct a high-level
UML model of WebDAV versioning available at
http://www.webdav.org/deltav/model/model990209/. From the model, we derived a
first pass at a protocol that extends HTTP and WebDAV to support the versioning
semantics. The protocol specification is available at
http://www.webdav.org/deltav/protocol/draft-ietf-webdav-versioning-02.txt.

There's lots of work left to be done. The protocol specification is just getting
started. Only the MKRESOURCE method, which was graciously done by Jim Whitehead,
is complete and is the model for how we hope to complete the rest of the
methods. Geoff Clemm and Chris Kaler are the authors of this document. Don't
hesitate to give them your input.

So far, we are pretty much on the schedule given in the charter. We are perhaps
a little behind in the protocol specification, but hope to have a completed
initial draft in time for the Washington IETF. We plan on having our first
DELTA-V working group meeting at the Washington IETF and will use the time to
review the protocol specification. Keep watching
http://www.ietf.org/meetings/IETF-46.html for further information.

Again, thanks for your participation. Versioning is an important part of
controlled distributed authoring on the Web. Its hard, and there are lots of
issues and compromises we have to address. But where there's a challenge,
there's also an opportunity. I look forward to working with all of you to bring
this important protocol extension to timely completion.