Re: Syncing WebDAV and local File Drive

[Dag Wieers <dag wieers com>]

On Mon, 13 Mar 2006, Russell Harrison wrote:

> > > If you're already using WebDAV you might want to think about using
> > > subversion (http://subversion.tigris.org/) to keep your files in sync.  It
> > > will also do all of the branching, versioning, merging you'll ever need.
> >
> > I doubt that is possible. Subversion makes use of DAV (plus its own
> > extensions) to do the versioning bits, but none of the tools that use DAV
> > known anything about versioning, so it simply fails to work.
> 
> That's really what I was getting at.  If they're already using WebDAV they
> might as well go the extra step.  It sounds as if they were concerned with
> versioning and synching something a full fledged version control system
> would be good for.

The moment you use it for subversion it won't be useful anymore for 
read-write access by anything other than subversion.

The problem with DAV concurrent use is proper locking. A possibility is to 
only use DAV access to this filespace (FUSE, VFS and DAV clients make this 
possible), but even then there is a risk of loosing work if applications 
do not check for file-changes (that happened after opening) before 
writing. The last one writing a file 'won'.

And then we hit a major problem on UNIX. Proper standardized file 
handling. (ie. disk-full conditions trash important files in almost all 
applications, applications that handle this all use their own 
implementation, ...)

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag wieers com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]