TIPP: Should packages have to identify themselves as self-contained?

[GoogleCodeExporter]

This question was posed by Micah in re: the 1.4 draft.  Since there's still no 
support for referenced external resources, I'm putting it here to track.

Micah asked:

- Should a package explicitly have to identify itself as being self-contained 
(embedded payload) or non-self-contained (possibly some embedded content, but 
at least 1 piece of linked content)?

This is an interesting question.  My initial instinct is to question whether 
this is essential -- if you would have to parse the manifest to get this flag 
anyways, how much harder would it be to figure out the answer for yourself by 
looking at the object listing?  (Additionally, by making people determine this 
themselves, we avoid error cases where there are malformed manifests that claim 
to be self-contained but are not, etc.)

I'd like to hear more about what value this would provide.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by tingley on 25 Mar 2012 at 9:19

• Blocked on: TIPP: Support for linked/external content #10

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Original comment by tingley on 25 Mar 2012 at 9:23