[Mailman-Developers] Re: Future of pipermail?

[Bill Bumgarner]

Chuq, et. al.,

See www.webdav.org for more information.

WebDAV is a standard that extends, but does not modify, HTTP to allow for  
several additional operations against a web server.  There are two levels to  
the specification.  Class 0 will be described before-- it is complete and  
production quality.  Class One is in the final stages of discussion and, as  
such, is not anywhere near having a reference implementation (but I will  
discuss briefly because it is very cool):

	- supports PUT of resources [files] onto the server (i.e. upload a  
file to server)

	- creation of collections (mkdir)

	- renaming/moving/deleting/copying of resources or collections

	- assigning properties to resources or collections.  A set of  
properties is basically a chunk of XML associated with the collection or  
resource.   For the MailMan WebDAV extensions, I use properties to store the  
mime-type and any extended headers associated with the attachment in question.

	- searching the properties database for particular values/attributes

	- locking;  locking is limited to write locks because read locks would  
have required modification of the HTTP spec.   Can have either shared or  
exclusive write locks.   However, it is trivial to throw together a cgi-bin/  
that allows read access to a resource if and only if the client sends a long  
the appropriate shared write lock token.  This is used in the Mailman WebDAV  
extensions to support lmited access to the archive of messages.

	- locks can have a timeout.    As such, it is trivial to generate an  
URL that allows access to a particular piece of the archive for, say, only the  
next 30 minutes.

---

Most importantly, WebDAV is truly a standard and a very widely accepted  
standard, at that.
	
	- Apple ships a WebDAV client with Mac OS X.   The builds of Apache  
with Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server both include WebDAV modules that are disabled  
by default.

	- Microsoft has full blown WebDAV support in Office and Windows 2000.   
 In Office, you can open a document served by a WebDAV server and subsequently  
hit ctrl-s to save (or save as) as if the document were on a local fileserver.

	- IBM's WebSphere fully supports WebDAV

	- Zope fully supports WebDAV

	- GoLive CyberStudio and other HTML authoring packages either ship  
with WebDAV support or have announced that they will soon.

So, WebDAV is, by no means, an apache only solution!   Because it is a simple  
extension to HTTP-- and class 0 is relatively trivial in nature-- WebDAV  
capabilities can be provided via cgi-bin/ without a problem.

---

The new class of DAV functionality is aimed at full support for version  
control.  This includes basic revisioning as well as tags, maps, workareas,  
multiple users, etc... This revision to the spec is in the final stages of  
discussion and Greg Stein-- author of mod_dav-- is actively working with the  
group to create an implementation of the spec.

---

In terms of Mailman, there is no real reason why creating the archive should  
be something that isn't completely abstracted within Mailman.   Archival is  
basically three tasks:

	- storing data

	- storing meta-infrormation

	- creating some kind of index/view

Decoding of attachments and rewriting the messages is mostly just an extension  
of the above concepts.

As such, the Mailman archival interface could be an abstract interface of  
which we provide two concrete implementations;   direct-to-filesystem and  
WebDAV.   The actual process of creating an index/view isn't really a Mailman  
problem-- obivously, it is useful to ship with an out-of-the-box solution.

b.bum

From: Chuq Von Rospach <chuqui@plaidworks.com>
Date: 2000-11-21 10:00:53 -0800
To: bbum@codefab.com, mailman-developers@python.org
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Re: Future of pipermail?
In-Reply-To: <200011211711.eALHB1322170@bjork.codefab.com>

At 12:11 PM -0500 11/21/00, Bill Bumgarner wrote:
>WebDAV works really, really well as an archiver.

webDAV?

Oh, man. I guess I need to go look at another piece of technology.
Wanna give those of us who have no clue what this is the 30 second
executive overview?

We can't, however, assume users are running Apache, even if it's the
overwhelming choice...
--
Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com)
Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com)

The vet said it was behavioral, but I prefer to think of it as genetic.
It cuts down on the liability -- Get Fuzzy