It seems like there are a number of open issues:

1. Is the only thing that is important from the subscriber's point of
view the current value of the event package, or is it important to
know something of the history of that value?  (People have been
discussing this.)

2. The interaction of ETags with partial notifications.  The draft
reads:

   With partial event notification, the NOTIFY message only carries the
   delta state, or the set of changes to the previous version of the
   entity.  In that case, implementations MUST consider the full event
   state as the version of the entity to which the entity-tag in the
   NOTIFY message applies.

That is, the ETags carry information about the composed full state
that the subscriber is maintaining by integrating the partial
notifications that it receives.

But it is problematic to use partial notifications in combination with
ETags:  When the notifier determines that the subscriber's current
state ETag is different from the current ETag of the resource, it does
not know what the subscriber's current state *is* (unless it maps the
presented ETag to a previous package value), and so cannot update the
subscriber with a partial notification.  Use of ETags seems to
effectively require the use of full notifications at all times.

3. Some event packages (e.g., dialog and resource-list) specify that
the package values within any individual subscription be sequence
numbered via a 'version' attribute in the XML.  This reduces the
chances of an ETags match between requests that are part of different
subscriptions, because a new poll-type SUBSCRIBE will necessarily
fetch a value with 'version="1"', and its ETag will not match the ETag
of any value that had a different version attribute, even if the rest
of the XML is the same.

This is particularly unfortunate because the version attribute does
not carry information that is important to the application; it is
control information that is largely redundant with the ETags mechanism
itself.

4. Conflicting assignments of ETags to values in notifiers that are
not co-administered, but are alternative forking destinations of some
URI in the universe.  (People have been discussing this.)

Dale
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