Web Versioning and Configuration Management WG (deltav)

Friday, March 23 at 0900-1130 
=============================

CHAIR: Jim Amsden (jamsden@us.ibm.com)


AGENDA:

Address any issues in preparation for IETF last call 
and progressing to Proposed Standard. 
A list of open issues will be posted to the mailing list 
before the working group meeting to enable preparation. 


DESCRIPTION: 

We had a very productive working group meeting at IETF 49. Now the 
spec has been updated, and we're ready to start the process of moving 
the versioning spec up the standards track to Proposed Standard! We 
have gone through two working group last calls, the second resulting 
in primarily document clarifications and some reorganization. The 
versioning semantics have actually been stable for quite some time. 
The protocol supporting those semantics has also reached the point 
where interoperable implementations will be the only way to really 
get at the last remaining issues. Distributed versioning is a complex 
domain, and meeting all the diverse needs of the community has resulted 
in a specification with quite a number of options. This seems necessary 
to meet the requirements of existing repository vendors who want to 
provide a standard protocol for accessing their resources, and to 
provide for flexible client implementations. In spite of the complexity 
of this domain, and as a direct result of the hard work from the Working 
Group, design team, document authors, and especially Geoff Clemm, there 
'don't appear to be any significant outstanding technical issues. 
There seems to be good common understanding within the working group, 
especially since the working group last calls which seem to have helped 
spark interest, questions, quality contribution, and issue resolution. 
I am particularly pleased with the level and quality of involvement on 
the DeltaV mailing list. This indicates real interest and commitment by 
the working group members. 

We also have a number of implementations that are already underway. 
These include at least two that are implementing many of the options as 
well as one, SubVersion, that is taking place in the Open Source community. 
These and other implementations would benefit from the increased stability 
and visibility of a Proposed Standard.