Re: [netmod] AD review of draft-ietf-netmod-system-mgmt

["Randy Presuhn" <[e-mail]>]

Hi -

> From: "Juergen Schoenwaelder" <[e-mail]>
> To: "Randy Presuhn" <[e-mail]>
> Cc: "Martin Bjorklund" <[e-mail]>; <[e-mail]>
> Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2013 11:57 AM
> Subject: Re: [netmod] AD review of draft-ietf-netmod-system-mgmt


...
> I am sure we discussed this option back in a day and I am sure there
> were people who said that an SNMP agent could store something that may
> accidentally now might look like an escaped unicode sequence but it
> was not intended to be one. And there might be interesting
> interactions with the size (length) restriction. Such thinking will
> force the conclusion that neither the HTML convention nor the \u
> convention can be used. So the only alternative is to use one of the
> 25 ASCII code points as an escape character that per RFC 2579 have no
> meaning in a DisplayString, e.g. ESC (ASCII code 0x1b).

Nope.  The escaped sequence is still longer, so the length-based
rationale doesn't work.

> approach avoids any conflicts, it leads to a very SNMP specific
> solution, which is not commonly understood and needs special
> processing by both machines and human brains. But then, SNMP would
> only add a little bit more to the noise out there already:
 
> http://billposer.org/Software/ListOfRepresentations.html

Whatever is easy, if not trivial to support with the scripting tools used by
operators would probably the best bet.  A C-like \u or HTML-like
&# convention is probably a really good bet.  I think the HTML escapes
might be less dangerous than the C-like ones (considering exotic formatting
capabilities), but am not married to one or the other.

> Anyway, for a standardized approach, someone would have to write a
> document that defines how unicode code points are represented as
> escaped charater sequences in DisplayStrings. I do not think that this
> document is in charge of doing this. Hence, until such a standard is
> written, I think things need to be implementation specific.

Perhaps, though that is the route to being stuck with ASCII until the
successor to Netconf rolls along.

Randy