4 ms·

As a totally honest question, what about WebDAV is so bad that you'll never touch it and instead wen this route?

unbit 12y ago
Seeing it from the perspective of a network filesystem (WebDAV by itself is a lot more, albeit afaik has never been used seriously as an authoring tool) it is a bit over-engineered, but the real problem (expecially when dealing with CardDAV and CalDAV) is the clients/servers inter-operation, as it looks like no-one is able to respect the RFCs (check the amount of hacks the radicale project or davvy needed to make OSX clients happy, or the differences between lightning, korganizer and so on). So the reason is that my patience ended :)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - unbit 12y ago
    lol :) but as already said there is no standard for POSIX access via HTTP. (WebDAV is not a competitor here, it is only the cause that pushed the development of spockfs)
  - Lerc 12y ago
    I'm wondering if Randall regrets writing this one because of the frequency it gets cited as a argument against new standards. Almost every commonly used Standard was born in a world with existing standards purporting to be the ideal solution for that niche. It's not even the sentiment that the comic represents. The comic refers to standards that try to in-the-darkness-bind-them. Competing formats and protocols should be encouraged and should compete on merit. If people use them because they are good, _then_ they can be elevated to the status of a standard. Bad formats only proliferate when they have another driving force behind them. "It's the standard" is one of those driving forces. Proprietary (and Cathedral) software also have the "We made this and you have to use it" problem.
JoshTriplett 12y ago
WebDAV doesn't go far enough; this exposes enough methods to provide a POSIX-compatible filesystem.
Lerc 12y ago
Speaking from the perspective of someone who touched WebDav and then wrote my own server alternative. WebDav is really that bad. It has a special combination of using XML to be theoretically extensible while generalised to use the lowest common denominator of features. I can't recall the specific details, but I certainly remember the pain. Apart from the inevitable and unnecessary translation from XML to a JavaScript object. I seem to recall there were weird cases where the XML format produced a different structure for cases where directories contained a single file. In the short term I found capturing the output of "ls -al urlpath" was vastly easier to deal with. In the longer term I wrote a server https://github.com/Lerc/userserv https://github.com/Lerc/userserv It might be worth me revisiting userserv to switch to the SpockFS protocol. Currently I use a websocket backchannel to do anything more complicated than static serving.

unbit 12y ago

Seeing it from the perspective of a network filesystem (WebDAV by itself is a lot more, albeit afaik has never been used seriously as an authoring tool) it is a bit over-engineered, but the real problem (expecially when dealing with CardDAV and CalDAV) is the clients/servers inter-operation, as it looks like no-one is able to respect the RFCs (check the amount of hacks the radicale project or davvy needed to make OSX clients happy, or the differences between lightning, korganizer and so on). So the reason is that my patience ended :)

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- unbit 12y ago
  lol :) but as already said there is no standard for POSIX access via HTTP. (WebDAV is not a competitor here, it is only the cause that pushed the development of spockfs)
- Lerc 12y ago
  I'm wondering if Randall regrets writing this one because of the frequency it gets cited as a argument against new standards. Almost every commonly used Standard was born in a world with existing standards purporting to be the ideal solution for that niche. It's not even the sentiment that the comic represents. The comic refers to standards that try to in-the-darkness-bind-them. Competing formats and protocols should be encouraged and should compete on merit. If people use them because they are good, _then_ they can be elevated to the status of a standard. Bad formats only proliferate when they have another driving force behind them. "It's the standard" is one of those driving forces. Proprietary (and Cathedral) software also have the "We made this and you have to use it" problem.

JoshTriplett 12y ago

WebDAV doesn't go far enough; this exposes enough methods to provide a POSIX-compatible filesystem.

Lerc 12y ago

Speaking from the perspective of someone who touched WebDav and then wrote my own server alternative. WebDav is really that bad. It has a special combination of using XML to be theoretically extensible while generalised to use the lowest common denominator of features. I can't recall the specific details, but I certainly remember the pain. Apart from the inevitable and unnecessary translation from XML to a JavaScript object. I seem to recall there were weird cases where the XML format produced a different structure for cases where directories contained a single file. In the short term I found capturing the output of "ls -al urlpath" was vastly easier to deal with. In the longer term I wrote a server https://github.com/Lerc/userserv https://github.com/Lerc/userserv It might be worth me revisiting userserv to switch to the SpockFS protocol. Currently I use a websocket backchannel to do anything more complicated than static serving.