The fixup stage is intended to produce this. We need both kinds of members, so we define a new operation called BIND different from move or copy. There s a requirement that references be able to carry properties. We can just say that trying to meet that goal led to a protocol with undesirable characteristics. In versioning, the only properties it was tempting to put on references were transitory and interesting only for the server.
Someone needs to write down the proposed semantics in detail.
Separate the issue of treating references as bindings from the issue of incorporating them in a property of collections. Need implementations to see whether there are problems with one approach or the other. A mapping to file system semantics can be a goal, but don t constrain the protocol to be the least common denominator of file systems. There must be a table or algorithm there, just add a new table entry, and have MOVE and COPY operate on the table - this shouldn t be hard. Jim D thinks this is not an easy implementation.