[Idr] Text representation of BGP Path Attributes (mostly Extended Communities)

[Maria Matejka <[e-mail]>]

Hello IDR,

the whole routing world is kinda split on how to format route
attributes. That should get resolved by the YANG thing, and if it were
up to myself, I would just send unformatted data without interpreting
all the extended communities, and write a library to encode/decode that.

Yet apparently it's not convenient to send extended communities as raw
data and interpret them on the client. Also certain vendors do regex
matching on the human-facing representation. Therefore we need
a formatting spec, so that the data on the wire is formatted correctly.

After poking the BGP YANG draft and after some conversations on the
list, I decided to try writing a draft specifying the canonical textual
representation of path attributes, so that it isn't totally buried
inside the YANG models.

The draft is not a complete work. It is intended to demonstrate the
intents and start a discussion. I would appreciate if anybody took a
look and said whether some approach like this is viable or desirable,
before I spend more time crunching more RFCs.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-marenamat-idr-bgp-attribute-formatting/

Note: I'm expecting to write a library, probably in Python, to convert
EC between human-facing format and raw data but I wanted to send
a heads-up first.

Have a nice weekend!  
Maria

-- 
Maria Matejka (she/her) | BIRD Team Leader | CZ.NIC, z.s.p.o.