Re: Thoughts on relation to WebDAV

Werner Baumann wrote:
> WebDAV is not a network file-system and never was intended to be. Please 
> read the documents, e.g.
> ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc2291.txt and
> ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc4918.txt

I would rephrase this as "it's not its single purpose".

> I am maintaining a WebDAV-file-system (davfs2, which is not a network 
> file-system but an intermediate solution for authoring tools without 
> built-in WebDAV-support). My experience with this work tells me:
> It is impossible to cleanly map WebDAV-resources into a 
> Unix-file-system. Though I am not really happy with RFC 4918, this point 
> is not the fault of the specification, because it was never intended for 
> this use.
> 
> It has become common practice, to reuse existing protocols for new 
> applications. That's OK. But when it turns out, that the chosen protocol 
> does not really meet the requirements of this application, there is the 
> bad habit of tweaking the original protocol, up to the point where it 
> gets unusable for its original intention. This must stop.

There's nothing wrong with tweaking/extending a protocol for things it 
wasn't designed for. It would be wrong to do something like that if it 
negatively affected existing usage.

Could you be a bit more specific of where you think this is happening?

> ...

BR, Julian