Re: [netmod] [Lsr] I-D Action: draft-ietf-lsr-ospfv3-extended-lsa-yang-10.txt

[Randy Presuhn <[e-mail]>]

Hi -

On 2022-04-09 4:36 AM, Christian Hopps wrote:
...
> FWIW, I'm not arguing for this change; however, to be fair, isn't this 
> also about the existing published modules that are using the incorrect 
> type?

No.  "Incorrect type" is a bit of a mischaracterization.  It's like
saying using "int32" is incorrect if all that is needed is "uint16".
One might say its a little sloppy or mutter "RTFM" under one's breath,
but it's not "incorrect."

Some modules have used a type that potentially can represent more
values than are needed for the intended purpose.  Whether those
implementations will ever accept or produce those values will
depend on whether the code, whether library, generated, or hand-
crafted, enforces the tighter constraints appropriate to the usage
or only the looser constraints appropriate to the type's specification.

But this is also true of every usage of any type where the use
can only exhibit a subset of the possible values of the type,
whether that subsetting is obvious from the description or not,
so I find it really hard to get excited about it.  The more nuanced
a repertoire of types becomes, the more likely developers won't
use exactly the right one, though one would hope that these foibles
are caught during the review process, at least until developers
start reading the documentation for the libraries they employ.

Even in these cases of "incorrect" usage, as Andy and others
have pointed out, stuff still works, because those cases only
require a subset of the values supported by the type.  If the
proposed change is made, usages requiring the full value space of
the original type definition will break, and those formerly
"incorrect" usages will exhibit no change in their behavior.

That is, the proposed change does not improve operation of
anything, and it breaks some things.

For me, it's more important for stuff to work (and to not break
stuff) than it is to align perfectly with the underlying aesthetics
of some naming system attributed post hoc to a set of types.

Randy