Back to Record Packing

["Ray Denenberg, Library of Congress" <rden@loc.gov>]

Trying to get  the "Record Packing" discussion back on the fast track, the 
discussion veered off to issues that may be orthogonal, or may not, for 
example how to pair the media type and schema.

But Tony, is it fair to say that the essence of what you are trying to 
achieve is (as you have put it) "allow for the possibility of the record 
data to rattle around a fixed skeleton."   And, in essence, you're proposing 
"unpacked" as a value of recordPacking to mean this?

Is this a fair summary?

If so, recall that in the last message on this, I suggested that  If we 
allow the client to say "unpacked" we also need to allow it to say
"packed", because we're going to want the server to be able to designate (in 
Explain) the default, so that if it designates json/(SRU)/unpacked as the 
default then the client doesn't have to say "unpacked" if that's what it 
wants but it has to say "packed" if that's what it wants. Right?

I also suggested that  we change "packed" and "unpacked" to "loose" and 
"strict"?

So if the client requests "loose" this means that the server is at liberty 
to supply a variation of the schema; if "strict" is requested then the
server should suppy the schema according to its definition.

--Ray