[Using Sakai] WebDAV & Sakai

[Luke Fernandez]

Marshall's suggestion below seems really sensible:

"If the legacy version of WebDAV can't meet all expectations, its
capabilities need to be documented clearly and completely so that others
don't waste their time either."

It makes sense to keep it around for those contexts in which it does work.
But that shouldn't happen on the backs of people who've been misled into
thinking that if they just try one more configuration change they'll get it
working on their own client.   The frustrations Marshall is reporting and
the time suck he experienced aren't new.  They've lurked in webdav ever
since it was first put into Sakai.  Those limitations should be clearly
documented.  -Luke
 On Feb 16, 2015 7:08 AM, "Marshall Feldman" <marsh at uri.edu> wrote:

>  Chuck,
>
> Sorry, my choice of words was poor and lends itself to an interpretation
> exactly the opposite of what was intended. I should have said, "Is there
> even a single operating system or app that works with Sakai and provides
> "fully functional WebDAV" capability, including the ability to mount the
> Sakai file system for more than just file transfer?"
>
> I fully understand the issues about resources and constraints. My first
> job after graduating college was as a systems programmer in a nuclear
> physics lab at MIT. The mainframe I worked on had been purchased as part of
> a two-year grant, the second year of which was cut off. So it had half the
> memory, disk storage, etc. than it was supposed to. Most of my time was
> spent figuring out how to make a system with only 512K of RAM do the work
> of one assumed to have 1 MB. (It was 1969.)
>
> Nonetheless, I spent (wasted) almost a day trying to make Sakai work the
> way I understood it to be designed to work. If the legacy version of WebDAV
> can't meet all expectations, its capabilities need to be documented clearly
> and completely so that others don't waste their time either. (At MIT, most
> of my time during the first six months on the job was devoted to
> documenting the modifications we'd done before and establishing
> documentation standards for the future.)
>
>     Marsh
>
> On 2/16/15 8:55 AM, Charles Severance wrote:
>
> Marshall -
>
>  The WebDav in Sakai is the best we can make it within the limits of the
> resources we have and the effort the community is willing to put into it.
> If you test some combination that we have as documented to work and that
> fails - the "finger" should point at us - period.
>
>  I attach the documentation for WIn8, Win7, WInXP, Mac, and Linux below.
> You should alway look a the instructions to try to get it to work because
> some of the instructions have special steps or caveats built in.
>
>  Our WebDav is based on a legacy implementation from the early 2000's -
> it is kind of amazing that it continues to work as well as it does over ten
> years later (see attached documentation).   It is a testament to a
> community of caring folks that pitch in and help whenever an operating
> system client gets tweaked and breaks mounting.
>
>  To answer your question below "Does Sakai provide "fully functional"
> WebDAV, to any operating system or app anywhere?" - the answer is "no".
> The phrase "fully functional, any app, anywhere" - is an impossible
> compliance expectation.  I doubt any WebDav server (even SharePoint) would
> say "yes" to that question.
>
>  If in your use you find something - it will always be possible to fix it
> given the availability of resources.  And unlike Microsoft or other
> proprietary vendors - in Sakai we talk openly about what works and what
> does not work - and we involve you in those discussions - which can be
> frustrating where there is not a simple "yes" answer - but in reality - far
> superior to working with a proprietary vendor.
>
>  /Chuck
>
>  P.S. I will be out at UCI at the Coursera partners conference the week
> of March 1 - perhaps we could sit down and talk more about this or any
> other Sakai questions you might have.
>
>    On Feb 15, 2015, at 4:08 PM, Marshall Feldman <marsh at uri.edu> wrote:
>
>  Chuck,
>
> I understand your point. For years Microsoft claimed to work with WebDAV,
> but Microsoft's implementation was notoriously buggy.
>
> OTOH, Cyberduck is primarily a file transfer program that can use any of
> several protocols, WebDAV being one of them. WebDAV, OTOH, is a way of
> using files on a web server as part of a distributed file system. Since in
> any file system one can move files, Cyberduck may do a very good job with
> this aspect of WebDAV on Sakai. But just because it can use this facet of
> WebDAV successfully does not mean Sakai's implementation is complete or
> without bugs.
>
> So as an end user, I'm still at this point caught between several parties
> pointing fingers. My local support person claims that Sakai doesn't really
> support WebDAV's distributed file system feature because Sakai keeps its
> files on varying machines in a cluster. Apple claims its OS works with
> WebDAV, and I've used it successfully with other WebDAV servers. So this
> also points to Sakai as the culprit. Some of the responses to my original
> query have implied that our local configuration of Sakai is at fault. Your
> reply implies that Sakai's implementation of WebDAV works, but Cyberduck
> functionality is not proof, as I said.
>
> So, I'll try a third rephrase of my question. I am concerned about Sakai
> providing "fully functional" WebDAV, to any operating system or app
> anywhere. By "fully functional" I am including the distributed file system
> aspect. By "app," I'm allowing for a more comprehensive app than Cyberduck,
> one that would actually make the local operating system see the WebDAV
> server as a mounted volume, thereby working around any bugs in the native
> WebDAV implementation. (For example, a company called OpenText
> <http://connectivity.opentext.com/products/network-file-system.aspx>
> sells a product that lets PC's share distributed files using NFS. It
> effectively adds this feature to Windows' native file system access.) So
> now the question is, "Can Sakai work as a fully functional WebDAV server
> with any operating system anywhere, whether through the operating system's
> native WebDAV implementation or through a third-party add-on?" Or more
> specifically, "Can Sakai provide distributed file system access through
> WebDAV to any operating system whatsoever, whether or not a special app
> provides this capability, so that files on Sakai are readable and writable
> through the native file system's built-in file access capabilities?" In
> other words, is the distributed file system aspect of WebDAV successfully
> implemented in Sakai at all?
>
>     Marsh
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