Re: BINDing using a weak reference

   From: "Eric Sedlar" <esedlar@us.oracle.com>

   Can a server implementer build both strong & weak BINDings and only allow
   cycles in weak bindings?

The current binding spec only defines strong bindings, but if your
server only allows cycles with weak bindings, you could implement BIND
by anchoring all resources with a strong binding outside of the URL
space, and then use weak bindings to implement all BIND operations.

   ccjason@us.ibm.com wrote:

   >      Alternately, a server implementer can disallow cyclic
   >      bindings from being inserted in the first place, which is
   >      computationally much cheaper, but which restricts the usefulness of
   >      BINDings.  (Like the way UNIX restricts hard links to directories).
   >
   >    This is now forbidden by the spec.
   >
   > Just to clarify.  By "this" Geoff was refering to the possibility of the
   > server not supporting cycles.  The proposed changes now require servers
   > to allow cycles to be created.  Geoff was not suggesting anything
   > regarding hard links to directories.

   Well either you can use the UNIX filesystem to support advanced collections
   or you can't.  It sounds like the current answer is that you can't.

You can, using the technique described above, i.e. implementing bindings
as symbolic links into a source tree maintained outside of the URL namespace.

Cheers,
Geoff

Received on Tuesday, 7 December 1999 17:30:32 UTC