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Re: Separation of protocol and information model



>>>>> Chen, Weijing writes:

>> Starting with a well understood set of operations and adding more
>> over time is IMHO not a bad engineering approach. SNMP's failure
>> was to simply not add the required protocol operations (and
>> transports I have to add) when it became clear they were needed. I
>> hope netconf will do better.

Weijing> Or maybe the operations should belong to the data model in
Weijing> the first place?  

netconf follows the data centric approach where you have a small set
of operations to operate on a conceptual data store which keeps the
management information. The alternatives are a functional approach
(where you define specific functions for all the various management
operations you envision for a certain subsystem) or an object-oriented
approach (where you bind some functions to data objects in an object
oriented manner - kind of a combination of the other two approaches).
Looking at the charter of this WG, I think the data centric approach
is already pre-determined as the way to go.

Weijing> Twisting and hacking (or extension in a more polite way)
Weijing> protocol operations will yield serious backward compatibility
Weijing> problem.  A version 2.0 of protocol XML schema will have to
Weijing> work for version 1.0 of protocol XML schema, and it is going
Weijing> to be complicated and confused.

Versioning is always painful if you do not think about it ahead of
time. I fail to see why versioning becomes any easier in a functional
approach compared to a data centric approach. And I believe that we
much better understand and (agree upon) the set of primitives needed
compared to the past, which increases the chances to get things right.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder		    International University Bremen
<http://www.eecs.iu-bremen.de/>	    P.O. Box 750 561, 28725 Bremen, Germany

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