Re: minutes for NETCONF WG interim meeting (09/03)

[Andy Bierman <abierman@cisco.com>]

At 02:01 AM 10/16/2003, Juergen Schoenwaelder wrote:

>>>>>> Andy Bierman writes:
>
>Andy> The group discussed the format of a capability.  The three
>Andy> choices considered were:
>
>Andy> a) separate data elements
>
>Andy>   <capability> <authority>ietf.org</authority>
>Andy> <version>1.0</version> <name>candidate</name> </capability>
>
>Andy> b) specific elements
>
>Andy>   <capability> <abc:candidate version="1.0"
>Andy> xmlns:abc="http://ietf.org/netconf/capabilities"/> </capability>
>
>Andy> c) URI
>
>Andy>   <capability> http://ietf.org/netconf/capabilities#candidate
>Andy> </capability>
>  
>Andy> The group decided on approach (a) because it is sometimes
>Andy> necessary to parse the version number.  Approach (b) requires
>Andy> more maintenance when a new capability is created, and also does
>Andy> not allow standard and proprietary capabilities to be handled in
>Andy> the same fashion.  Approach (c) does not allow the version field
>Andy> to be easily identified and parsed.
>
>This is kind of surprising for me. The schema definition of netconf
>already uses URIs with embedded version numbers and in the XML world
>it just seems a common technique to use URIs for identification
>purposes (like SNMP folks are used to use OIDs for identification
>purposes). I fail to see the difficulty to parse URIs when the format
>is well defined, especially if you consider scripting languages where
>this usually can be done with a simple regular expression. (And doing
>such things in C is also not that hard - some libraries also help you
>by breaking URIs into pieces.)

I think the key point is the need for parsing the identifier.
We don't need to parse OIDs.  They are good as global
identifiers via decentralized naming authorities.
URIs would also serve that purpose well.  But OIDs
don't have version numbers.   The group at the interim
felt it would be better to provide a distinct version number
rather than create a strict URI format that every vendor
must use for their own schema and capability definitions.


>It should be possible to register a URN namespace for netconf if we
>are interested in well controlled names for standardized capabilities.
>
>/js

Andy


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