Re: [netmod] Does the YANG "status" statement inherit from its parent node?

[Juergen Schoenwaelder <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Dec 21, 2016 at 02:47:49PM -0800, Andy Bierman wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> YANG data is hierarchical.
> It makes no sense at all the consider the descendant nodes current
> when the parent is deprecated or obsolete.  If the parent goes away
> then it is impossible to access any descendant nodes, so the
> default status of 'current' is meaningless in this case.
> 
> If you augment somebody else's subtree and they decide to deprecate
> or obsolete it, your data is also deprecated or obsolete.
> That's how hierarchcal data works.
>

We disagree, in particular when it comes to deprecated. And as I
mentioned in a previous email, the bigger picture is not just about
containers and nesting hierarchies. We can deprecate typedefs,
groupings, we may deprecate a leaf that is referred to by other
leafrefs etc. With your idea that deprecating something means that
everything that directly or indirectly refers to this something gets
automatically deprecated as well, we may turn 'deprecated' into a
pointless tool.

In general, it is impossible to determine what all directly or
indirectly refers to a certain definition unless you have access to
all YANG modules in the world. So how can you ever take a decision to
deprecate something if there is no reliable way to assess the impact?
Hence, the deprecate status becomes effectively pointless. I rather
have an interpretation of deprecated that actually serves a purpose,
namely making maintainers of current definitions aware that their
current definitions depend on something now deprecated.

Perhaps I am blinded by the way @deprecate or __attribute__
((deprecated)) or [[deprecated]] work in various programming
languages. All these annotations do not deprecate my code, they just
cause the generation of warnings so that I get aware of the issue and
can do my homework.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder           Jacobs University Bremen gGmbH
Phone: [phone]         Campus Ring 1 | 28759 Bremen | Germany
Fax:   [phone]         <http://www.jacobs-university.de/>