Re: [RTG-DIR] RTG-DIR QA review of draft-ietf-babel-rfc6126bis-04.txt

["Susan Hares" <[e-mail]>]

Juliusz:

Are your users only using proprietary management?  Or are they using another
open source management mechanism?

Sue Hares 

-----Original Message-----
From: Juliusz Chroboczek [mailto:[e-mail]] 
Sent: Saturday, January 6, 2018 12:21 PM
To: Donald Eastlake
Cc: Susan Hares; David Schinazi; Alia Atlas; Russ White; [e-mail]
Subject: Re: RTG-DIR QA review of draft-ietf-babel-rfc6126bis-04.txt

>> for example, saying that BABEL implementations SHOULD support 
>> NETCONF, a YANG model will be in a separate document,

> I am fairly sure that such a statement would not reflect WG consensus.
> Requiring a full YANG implementation (which includes, for a start, an 
> XML
> parser) in every Babel implementation would be a sure way to kill the 
> protocol.

I realise that I should clarify this.

The simplicity and implementability of Babel is one of its main features.
Babel can be explained to a lecture hall of fourth-year students in 40
minutes.  Babel can be implemented in less than 1000 lines of Python code,
and a stub implementation of Babel has been written that compiles to 12kB of
text.  Babel has been independently reimplemented three times, and in one
case it took the author (Markus Stenberg) just two nights to do the
implementation.

Given how important for us it is that Babel is a conceptually simple and
highly implementable protocol, I believe that it would be a tragic mistake
to make Babel dependent on the arguably complex protocol stack that is
NETCONF/YANG/XML.

What is more -- Babel development has been driven by the needs of our users.
While we have been actively discussing management issues with our userbase
for the last years (I can send some pointers to the list if you're
interested), none of our users have every requested support for YANG.
Hence, by making Babel dependent on YANG, we would not be serving our
constituency well.

-- Juliusz