On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 11:12 AM, Vladimir Berezniker <v...@hitechman.com> wrote: > If someone does not mind explaining. What would be the benefit of having > this decision be made by the server vs the client having to request that via > a explicit parameter on the request?
It's not so much of a benefit as it is a compatibility problem. We support WebDAV clients with auto-versioning. WebDAV+auto-versioning lets you mount a SVN repository as though it was a regular file system and just start making changes with each change automatically committed as a revision. These clients are at current indistinguishable from a web browser, they make similar requests that a web browser would and don't have some pattern we can key off in the GET request. When using these clients it's important that we don't present to them a different version of the file than what the repository actually stores. Otherwise we break this functionality. Using a query parameter means you can ask for the keyword expansion without breaking these clients.
