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Overview
The Sambar Server Pro includes a Document Manager interface which
allows the users to remotely maintain the content of the server
(see Document Manager).
In addition, the WebDAV
(Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) specification, RFC 2518, is
being implemented in the server.
These interfaces provide overlapping mechanisms for document management,
but document versioning is necessary to round out the offering. The
remainder of this document outlines the versioning functionality
provided in Sambar Server Pro.
Version management is concerned with tracking and accessing the
history of important states of a single resource, such as a Web page.
Future server development will likely focus on parallel development
and configuration management; it is recognized that versioning alone is
insufficient for managing large sets of content. Note: Several WebDAV
projects are attempting to address content management issues.
SCCS
The Sambar Server Versioning implementation uses a thread-safe SCCS
library implementation that contains numerous attribute and content
storage extensions; existing SCCS files should be forward-compatible.
Further, tools such as sccs2rcs should be able to successfully
migrate documents from a Sambar Server repository to an RCS or CVS
repository without loss of metadata.
Modifications to "standard" SCCS implementations include:
- The directory used for document versions, locking information etc.
is .DAV rather than SCCS.
- The SCCS implementation does not run setuid. All authentication
and authorization is performed by existing Sambar Server mechanisms.
- Additional meta-data information is stored in WebDAV XML resources
in the .DAV directory.
- All non-ASCII based files are automatically stored in a binary,
compressed format to conserve disk space.
- The bin/sccs tool provided for manipulating files via a
command shell is only partially compatible with "standard" SCCS
implementations. See the SCCS documentation
for usage details.
Performance
The .DAV directory includes a compressed (gzip) version of all files
stored under the version control system. The server takes advantage
of this when returning static pages to clients by returning the compressed
file rather than the uncompressed file if the user's browser accepts
gzip encodings (IE 4.0+ and Netscape 4.0+). This can significantly improve
server performance and speed delivery by reducing the amount of data
transfered. Benchmarks indicate an average improvement of 30% for
HTML content. See the Performance documentation
for details on this and other server options.
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