[yang-doctors] Identities vs enums

["Rob Wilton (rwilton)" <[e-mail]>]

I doubt that this is the first time that this has come up ...

draft-ietf-netmod-intf-ext-yang-07, defines 3 identities (along with a base identity) for loopback configuration: "loopback-internal", "loopback-line" and "loopback-connector".

One of the reviewers is complaining that the "loopback-" prefix in the identity is redundant and noisy.  I.e. he doesn't like having to write loopback='loopback-internal', and would like to be able to write loopback='internal' instead.

His main suggestion is to move these loopback (or perhaps just the identities) to a separate YANG module so that they don't need to define a "loopback-" prefix.

There seem to be some choices here:

(1) Keep with identities with a "loopback-" prefix.  This causes loopback='loopback-internal'

(2) Keep with identities, but loose the common prefix, i.e. the identities become "internal", "line", "connector".  Given the size of the module, the likelihood of an identity naming clash in future seems quite small, but they are somewhat generic terms.
(3) Use shorter identity names, but also put them in a separate types module (as requested by the reviewer).
(4) Use an enum rather than identities.  Although this has the potential issue that the enum cannot be extended (which I'm wondering if this is something that we should consider changing in the hypothetical YANG Next).

Personally, I'm toying with changing to 4 or perhaps 2.  I'm not keen on 3.

Any thoughts or opinions from the YANG doctors?

Thanks,
Rob