Re: [netmod] Joint WGLC on "semver" and "module-versioning" drafts

[Robert Varga <[e-mail]>]

On 30/05/2023 20.28, Jürgen Schönwälder wrote:
>    It is unclear what "identical" means here. If two people extract a
>    module from an RFC, they may not end up with identical byte
>    sequences. So does white space matter when we talk about MUST be
>    identical? What about comments? The problem is that the IETF still
>    publishes YANG modules in RFCs instead of files.

As for RFC vs. files, the mechanics of extracting of files from RFCs 
seems to be well established, plus it is an IETF-owned cron job which 
updates https://github.com/YangModels/yang/tree/main/standard/ietf/RFC 
-- so I would (and I actually do) assume that is the normative source of 
byte-exact files.

In my opinion "identical" leaves little room for interpretation: it is 
byte-exact, i.e. md5sum (and everything else of that kind) returning the 
same value.

If we were to say "equivalent", now that would be a whole another kettle 
of fish.

I stand to be corrected, but I do not believe there is a single 
normative statement about handling equivalent Unicode encodings. As a 
tool author, I believe having that is a hard prerequisite to be solved 
before we ever embark on pulling in YANG semantics into the conversation.

I do have opinions around that, in particular the equivalence of
- description "foo"
- description 'foo'
- description foo
and the order of preference of those (which may contradict best current 
practice), but I certainly do not have the cycles to engage in that 
discussion to a reasonable depth :(

Regards,
Robert