Re: [netmod] 6991bis: address-with-prefix-length

[Kristian Larsson <[e-mail]>]

On 2019-04-02 20:48, Juergen Schoenwaelder wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 02, 2019 at 08:27:32PM +0200, Martin Bjorklund wrote:
>>
>>> I
>>> think that I also now agree with Martin that this is really merging
>>> two values into one leaf.
>>
>> And for the record (again, perhaps), I think this is a bad idea in
>> general, and I am not sure an exception is needed in this case.
>>
> 
> This format is used and convenient where it is used (and I do
> sometimes miss it at other places where it is not used). I would not
> be religious about this combination of values. Note that even
> ip-prefix is a combination of a prefix length and an address
> 'pattern'. So ip-address-and-prefix is actually three values in
> one. ;-)

I agree that it's useful and please avoid religious. Though I think 
ip-address-and-prefix-length is still two values at max. ip-prefix is 
two values in the common storage form since we typically use a fixed 
length 32 bit integer for storing an IP address and then need a second 
field to tell us how many bits are significant for the prefix. A more 
natural way of storing it could have used a variable length field in 
which case a /8 network really would only be 8 bit long (but then again, 
variable length field typically are stored as TLV or LV, so two values 
again... but way below our abstraction level now).


> We have yang:date-and-time, a combination of date and time (we are
> adding these right now). yang:date-and-time actually clumps together
> year, month, day, hours, minutes, seconds, optional subseconds,
> timezone. For me, it seems useful to adopt commonly used formats.

This rings very true to me. Even if the IETF interfaces-ip model doesn't 
use these types, they are being used by Cisco, Juniper etc in their 
proprietary models, it's just that the type is currently string or 
something like that - if they could use a common IETF data type then it 
would be easier to cast this to a proper data type in a programming 
language, so like when you parse the config you'd get a Python 
ipaddress.IPv4Network object out of this or similar.

    kll