On Tue, Nov 22, 2005 at 10:50:56AM +0100, Tom Petch wrote:
I always associate the term notification with SNMPv3 - I don't see
it used elsewhere - which does not appear to define it but implies
it is asynchronous, an unsolicited transmission, an event
notification; and there is an implicit size limit because of UDP,
something NETCONF lacks.
I think the term notification is not that unusual - even Corba has a
"notification service".
The original charter did have asynchronous in it, which seems right
to me, but I would like something about limiting the size as well,
to stop people including a storage dump with the restart
notification, but I don't have a good wording for it - perhaps 'a
notification is a brief, asynchronous message indicating that an
event has occurred'.
I believe it is not a good approach to try to prevent people from
mis-using a protocol by means of rules or definitions (basically this
is the source of CLRs).
I favour an approach where a document spells out why it is a really
bad idea to use a certain protocol feature in a certain way.
I think the current netconf protocol spec does not define minimum
required message sizes for the RPC or operations layer. Introducing
such constraints for notifications to prevent their misuse I think is
not helpful. In fact, it might be more helpful if during the greeting
boxes could just advertise the message sizes they support, much like
ESMTP does it.