[occi-wg] confusion about status of link / headers

[Alexis Richardson]

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 10:46 PM, Sam Johnston <samj at samj.net> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 7:47 PM, Alexis Richardson
>
> I think it's best you stick to calling the consensus based on discussions,

That's the plan I'd like: Discussions - on this list - about clear
changes to a specific draft.



> which hopefully you will also be contributing to (there's no harm in wearing
> both hats if you keep the roles separate).

Ha, I hope so.


> Such a "test" is highly subjective and easily [ab]used to short circuit
> consensus and/or suppress ideas you don't personally understand or
> appreciate.

Yes, our current process is too open to such abuses.



> Case in point is the unjustified claim that using HTTP headers
> for metadata is somehow experimental "new technology" when it was explicitly
> defined for this purpose by RFC2068 over a decade ago and used extensively
> since:
>
>> Entity-header fields define optional metainformation about the entity-body
>> or, if no body is present, about the resource identified by the request.

If applying this to more metadata has been such a good idea for a
decade, why wasn't it adopted much more?  Answer - we don't know.
This absence of certainty appears to have been a legitimate source of
concern for many people.


> Conversely the creation of a domain-specific language for each and every
> resource that we need to represent (at least 3 for infrastructure, 5-10+ for
> platforms and an infinite number for applications) and somehow keeping that
> in sync with authorative "native" representations like OVF is *far* more
> experimental, error prone and ultimately likely to fail.

We are doing infrastructure, and basing it as much as possible on prior art.

alexis