Re: [NGO] NETCONF Data types

On Tue, Dec 04, 2007 at 07:33:55PM -0500, Sharon Chisholm wrote:

> One of the things that people seemed to agree on early in the NETCONF
> content discussion was that SNMP & SMI defined too many similar data
> types and we didn't want to do that in NETCONF. Do people still agree
> that we don't want 30 flavours of integers defined? 

In SMI land, we defined many types in an attempt to express
relationships which are otherwise not expressable. The reason we have
things such as InterfaceIndex and InterfaceIndexOrZero is that we
wanted to capture 'hey this number here actually identifies an
interface'. With a different data modeling language, you might not
need to do this anymore via the type system since you might have other
mechanisms to express the information that a value is actually
identifying an interface.

<soap>
  This is actually an nice example demonstrating that the features of
  a data modeling language will influence the way other features of a
  language are used. The INET-ADDRESS-MIB is another example demoing
  how we had to hack around the lack of unions in the SMI. You can of
  course convert all this stuff algorithmically to XSD; whether the
  result is useful in other contexts (say for NETCONF configuration)
  needs to be considered.
</soap>

That said, I take most of the blame for the collection of data types
in the YANG modules contained in the YANG draft. I tries to create a
core collection of reusable types, but I am sure the result is
somewhat biased and I might have simply overlooked something. I like
to encourage people to take a look at the defined types in the YANG
document and if you think something is wrong, missing, or should not
be there, please drop a note so we can work things out.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder           Jacobs University Bremen gGmbH
Phone: +49 421 200 3587         Campus Ring 1, 28759 Bremen, Germany
Fax:   +49 421 200 3103         <http://www.jacobs-university.de/>

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