[glue-wg] New Endpoint and Service types

[stephen.burke at stfc.ac.uk]

Paul Millar [mailto:paul.millar at desy.de] said:
> At this stage, I'm happy if we can agree that publishing the 
> set of RFCs an Endpoint supports is reasonable thing to do :-)

I'm not strongly opposed to this as a concept, but I would make a couple of points. Firstly, many grid protocols don't have RFCs or GFDs so this can't be a universal mechanism. Secondly, as far as I'm aware we so far have only one case, i.e. webdav/http, where there is a real issue, so we should beware of ending up with something which would complicate publishing and querying for the vast majority of cases which work perfectly well already.

> The description of InterfaceExtension is almost semantically 
> null: "the 
> identification of an extension to the interface protocol supported by 
> the Endpoint." -- there's nothing about what an extension *is*, but 
> there is a hint that this has something to do with protocols.

I already explained the history of this - we have never defined the usage of InterfaceExtension up to now because it was never needed, but that's no reason not to do it now if we do need it.

> SupportedProfile also has a semantically null description 
> (again, what is a profile?), but I can guess what is meant.  RFCs could be 
> published 
> as SupportedProfile legitimately, but this probably wasn't 
> the intention of this attribute.

Again, I don't think we've ever had a use which required us to define it. I would conceptually see this as going in the opposite direction, in the sense that InterfaceExtensions would be something additional to the basic Interface, whereas a profile would be a restriction or specialisation.

Stephen
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