webdav and file overwriting

[Eric Lawman <elawman eastwestp com>]

I am new to the list, so please forgive me if this is posted in the 
wrong area.  I am the maintainer of an open source document management 
system.  It has a webdav interface which I have spent some time recently 
modifying to work with Gnome 2.10's Webdav client in VFS.  My question 
is regarding behavior in gnome which I am not seeing in any other webdav 
clients.  When overwriting a file, the gnome client deletes the file 
from the server before uploading the new file.  Other clients simply 
upload the file and allow the server to handle the overwrite.  The 
latter is the behavior I desire, as my document management system 
maintains revision histories of files.  If a file is deleted by the 
client, then all past revisions are lost as well.  With other clients, 
the new revision is simply created when the file is "overwritten".  Upon 
reading the spec for COPY with overwrite set to True, it states the 
server must initiate a delete of the file to be overwritten, not the client.

If someone could provide some insight on this, or let me know if I'm 
misinterpreting something, I'd appreciate it.

Thank you.

Eric.