Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 38.118.20.90]
on August 22, 2007 07:21 PM
WebDAV is nice, but lacking in some key areas -- notably authorization.
AuthENTICaction is handled nicely by Apache; plugins exist for LDAP, even "/etc/shadow" authentication. Authorization, however -- controlling who has access to which resources -- is pretty weak. At the filesystem level, all files need to be readable/writeable by the "httpd" process. Then, once connected, any authenticated user assumes that UID. You can't, for example, restrict access to a directory to only two people.
For many simple cases, this might be okay, but as soon as you start doing anything "industrial-strengthed" WebDAV starts to show its shortcomings.
Also, the "Versioning" part is misleading. One would think that "Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning" would actually INCLUDE versioning. No, it's merely a nice way of saying, "OH! You can use it with Subversion." You still have to USE Subversion, though -- i.e., run "svn co http://www.blablablah.com/dav/svn/lmnop..."
If WebDAV truly supported versioning, it would handle it transparently: when you save (upload or "PUT") a file, it should generate the appropriate historical information behind the scenes. Then you should be able to ask for, e.g., "/dav/myfile.txt?revision=1.2" or whatever.
I'm hopeful that these issues will be addressed in the future.
The idea of a web-based filesystem is certainly intriguing, though...
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WebDAV Still Leaves A Lot To Be Desired
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 38.118.20.90] on August 22, 2007 07:21 PMWebDAV is nice, but lacking in some key areas -- notably authorization.
AuthENTICaction is handled nicely by Apache; plugins exist for LDAP, even "/etc/shadow" authentication. Authorization, however -- controlling who has access to which resources -- is pretty weak. At the filesystem level, all files need to be readable/writeable by the "httpd" process. Then, once connected, any authenticated user assumes that UID. You can't, for example, restrict access to a directory to only two people.
For many simple cases, this might be okay, but as soon as you start doing anything "industrial-strengthed" WebDAV starts to show its shortcomings.
Also, the "Versioning" part is misleading. One would think that "Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning" would actually INCLUDE versioning. No, it's merely a nice way of saying, "OH! You can use it with Subversion." You still have to USE Subversion, though -- i.e., run "svn co http://www.blablablah.com/dav/svn/lmnop..."
If WebDAV truly supported versioning, it would handle it transparently: when you save (upload or "PUT") a file, it should generate the appropriate historical information behind the scenes. Then you should be able to ask for, e.g., "/dav/myfile.txt?revision=1.2" or whatever.
I'm hopeful that these issues will be addressed in the future.
The idea of a web-based filesystem is certainly intriguing, though...
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:- Dabe (www.Dabe.com)
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