Re: Tombstones

[James M Snell <jasnell@xxxxxxxxx>]

Steven Lees wrote:
> James Holderness wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> But there's definitely a balance to be achieved. It would be helpful to take a few steps back and spend some time discussing the scenarios, not just the technical details. From this thread, I've seen a few (not mutually exclusive) ideas described:
> 
> 1) "hard" delete: delete an item and it's gone forever
> 2) "soft" delete: you can delete an item but the data and metadata are preserved so that you can un-delete the item
> 3) ability to delete comments from a blog for spam control
> 4) ability to delete posts from a blog
> 5) full two-way sync between nodes via feeds
> 6) ability to verify the source of an entry or tombstone
> 
> And there are probably more that I missed.
>

7. one way (master-replica) full and incremental sync.
8. ability to notify aggregators that content must be removed for legal
reasons (e.g. dmca... blech)

A common thread across all these scenarios is the need to explicitly
indicate the fact that an entry has been removed from a feed.  Given
that, it would make sense to have a commonly defined tombstone
mechanism.  It also seems clear that the representation of deleted items
is distinct from the ability to perform a sync, so it would make sense
to separate those as well.  Having a separate Tombstones spec is making
a whole lot of sense at this point.

- James