Re: [netconf] YANG Push drafts comments

[William Lupton <[e-mail]>]

Thanks Eric. Please see some follow-ups below (I've removed items where I
have no further comment). Cheers, W.

On Tue, 29 Jan 2019 at 20:31, Eric Voit (evoit) <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Hi William,
>
>
>
> Thanks for the interest, thoughts in-line...
>
>
>
> *From:* netconf <[e-mail]> *On Behalf Of *William Lupton
> *Sent:* Tuesday, January 29, 2019 6:41 AM
> *To:* [e-mail]
> *Subject:* [netconf] YANG Push drafts comments
>
>
> 1.      General:
>
> 1.      Why is the subscription id optional? Without it, will the
> receiver always be able to tell how to handle an event message?
>
> I assume you are referring to the pushed notification messages carrying
> event records.  The RFC-5277 one way notification doesn’t support a
> subscription-id object in its current event schema, so we can’t embed this
> object for subscribed-notifications.  This is one reason that
> draft-ietf-netconf-notification-messages was adopted.  For YANG push, we do
> have a subscription-id in the notification definition, which is then
> carried within the RFC-5277 one-way notification.
>

I would expect this question to arise in the minds of many readers. A note
might be useful?


> 2.      draft-ietf-netconf-subscribed-notifications:
>
>
>
> 3.      Event record:
>
> 1.      So does the "event record" term apply to all the drafts? If so,
> does "event" apply to all the drafts? (This note is in the context of a
> later note about the fact that "event stream" appears to be specific to
> this draft.)
>
> Subscribing to an event stream is different than a subscribing to a
> datastore. [...]
>

This was a terminology comment. I felt that it wasn't always clear which
terms were generic and would apply to all drafts. "event record", "event"
and "event stream" caused me particular problems. It was just a comment...
if people don't think there's a need for clarification (or greater rigor in
the use of terms) then that's fine.


> 4.      Event stream:
>
> 1.      Having now read most of the YANG Push draft, I realize that
> "Event streams" are a legacy thing and are not used by YANG Push. This
> could be made clear. Otherwise it looks like these are a base concept that
> will be built on.
>
> I think event streams are useful.  I don’t consider them legacy.
>

I didn't mean "legacy" pejoratively. Reading the draft I was thinking "Ah,
event streams are a core concept that will be leveraged by the other
drafts". So I was surprised to discover that YANG Push doesn't use them.
Assuming that I'm correct here, I think that a note (either here or in YANG
Push) could be helpful.


> 3.      So referring to them as sets of Events (rather than sets of Event
> streams) seems inaccurate.
>
> I don’t see any text on either sets of events, or sets of event streams.
>

Sorry, part of this got lost in translation. I intended to refer to the
fact that:

   - Event stream is defined (1.2) as "A continuous, chronologically
   ordered set of events..."
   - And then later (2.1) it seems to be suggested that an event stream is
   a set of event records (rather than a set of events)

(But re-reading it just now, I'm not sure whether it really says this! I
also note that you commented on this point later. So we can drop this one.)


> 5.      Notification message:
>
> 1.      I don't find "The time the event was generated by the event
> source" quite clear. Is it the time at which the change occurred or was
> detected (event occurrence time), or the time at which the message was
> created? Probably the former?
>
> I can’t find the exact text quote:  "The time the event was generated by
> the event source" .   Where is this?
>

Sorry. The actual text is from RFC 5277, describing eventTime. Obviously
I'm not suggesting that RFC 5277 be changed!