Julian,
Let me explain the strategy.
mod_dav_svn on the proxy should identify whether a given PROPFIND is for
commit or *not*, we are not bothered about any of the other read
operation intricasies.
First I had a plan to persist the occurence of preceding 'MKACTIVITY' on
the connection pool to classify subsequent PROPFIND on same connection
as 'commit PROPFIND'.
Justin was not happy about this as he was saying some bad old clients
can make each requests in its own connection so this detection can be
faulty for those poor clients.
So this new SVN-ACTION request header came.
The patch attached to the Philips response earlier applies 'SVN-ACTION'
based detection and if it fails defaults to connection based detection.
Once detected a PROPFIND as for commit we just proxy it.
Hope this explains.
With regards
Kamesh Jayachandran
On 01/06/2010 07:35 PM, Julian Foad wrote:
Kamesh,
Can you explain your strategy for fixing the original "commit via
outdated proxy" issue, and why this change is part of that strategy?
Something about this approach doesn't feel right to me, as I don't see
how a single word can accurately convey the proxy semantics of a
Client never need to know anything about the proxy.
high-level command. I am wondering whether it is even possible to make
the proxy do what you want without having total control over the
We can, we have two detection strategies explained above which should
catch most of the clients(even the ones which do *not* set SVN-ACTION
header).
clients.
(And if you do want to make some APIs take a "high-level operation" text
field, you need to specify what values are allowed and required - e.g.
does it have to be one of a fixed set of values, or any restrictions on
the length and what characters can be used, and whether the value has to
be known by the server, etc.)
Why not allow arbitrary value, let us say some fancy svn app can create
custom workflow and give its own identifier say
'merge_aware_revision_graph etc.'
As long as they are not calling 'commit' operation as a something else
we are fine(Even then our backup logic would catch).
With regards
Kamesh Jayachandran
- Julian
Bert Huijben wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Kamesh Jayachandran [mailto:kam...@collab.net]
Sent: woensdag 6 januari 2010 14:00
To: dev@subversion.apache.org
Subject: [PATCH] Make svn clients indicate their operation name to
backend(right now only to DAV)
Hi All,
This patch is with respect to the original thread
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/subversion-
dev/201001.mbox/browser
Once this patch gets committed I can commit the mod_dav_svn change to
handle the original commit via outdated proxy issue.
This Patch revs the following public APIs,
'svn_client_uuid_from_url', 'svn_client_open_ra_session' and
'svn_ra_open3'.
I have a few high level questions about this patch:
Why do you rev svn_client_uuid_from_url?
I would think that that function is a high level API, so it would be an
operation by itself.
(looking at svn_client.h) What should I put in there as client that just
needs the uuid or verify that the repository exists?
"checking-uuid-for-visualization-to-my-great-users"?
I don't think we should rev the svn_client_ API for this specific change
here; especially since older clients will not pass anything anyway.
libsvn_client should fill that high level operation for library users or the
value is of no use on the server.
And it should never be forwarded to master servers as the uuid is supposed
to be constant per repository.
(BTW. the api is new in 1.7, so it needs no revving at all)
Then on to the rest of the patch:
For ra_neon and ra_serf layers it sets the http client header SVN-ACTION
with the concerned svn command name.
If the operation is a plain string that can be set by any future client, how
is the server to understand what the user wants? How can the server
understand a new 'shelve' command we might add in Subversion 1.9?
mod_dav_svn only knows RA operations and doesn't understand high level
commands; we would have to add this knowledge.
Shouldn't the individual RA operations tell whether the user needs access to
the master or the slave?
Thinking a bit further about that last issue... What if the session is
reused for e.g. requests like 'svn info', 'svn update' and then a 'svn
commit'.
Our standard client libsvn_client can't do this, but other clients can
certainly do that.
There is nothing in the ra api that forbids using it that way, but just
specifying a high level operation at open time doesn't tell enough about
what the clients application intent is.
Maybe we should just add a boolean to requests indicating whether to forward
to a master? That seems like a much simpler solution, that we could possibly
port back to older subversion releases.
Bert
With& Without this patch mergeinfo_test-8 fails both over ra_neon and
ra_serf.
If there are no objections I will commit this change in next 2 days.
With regards
Kamesh Jayachandran
