On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 6:17 AM, Julian Reschke <julian.resc...@gmx.de> wrote: > On 31.03.2010 21:20, C. Michael Pilato wrote: >> >> ... >> - "WebDAV sucks. Period." >> ... > > Out of curiosity: what's the relation to writing a Subversion FS backend?
It added a lot of friction to the development process. Because of svn's reliance on end-to-end tests, bugs or mistakes (like returning the wrong error code) in our new FS implementation would usually manifest themselves far away from the FS code. Often problems would take the form of a crash in one the DAV layers, and these were always the most painful to debug. In my opinion, the code in mod_dav and mod_dav_svn is of much lower quality than the code found elsewhere in Subversion: it is brittle, not (or barely) documented, and is full of fun things like 500-line functions with hardly any comments. There is a tremendous amount of indirection (particularly in the rarely-exercised code paths related to error-handling), so things tend to blow up far away from the root cause and it is often difficult to reconstruct exactly what went wrong. Debugging these things tended to be multi-day affairs. WebDAV introduces a huge amount of complexity, but as far as I can tell it buys svn essentially nothing. The design of the protocol seems to be predicated on the peculiar notion that network round-trips are free. The idea of using an HTTP-based protocol was fundamentally sound, but in retrospect WebDAV seems to have been an unfortunate choice. Best, -J > > Best regards, Julian > > PS: and, of course, it's not true :-) >
