Re: NETCONF Notifications: Consensus Points

[Randy Presuhn <randy_presuhn@mindspring.com>]

Hi -

> From: Andy Bierman <ietf@andybierman.com>
> Sent: Nov 25, 2005 10:32 AM
> To: netconf@ops.ietf.org
> Subject: NETCONF Notifications: Consensus Points
...
> Terminology:
>
>  The term Notification is preferred over Event Message.

My understanding of current IETF usage of "Notification" is as a
way of talking about the realization of a NOTIFICATION-TYPE, without
pinning it down to the specific SNMP PDU=type used to carry the
information.  I think that using it in the context of netconf to refer
to a particular message type would only be asking for confusion.

...
> Application-Level ACKs
>
>   It is not clear what a sender would do differently even
>   if it knew the receiver did not understand the message.

This is only one of the possible reasons for application-level
acknowledgments.  A more important one is that for purposes
such as log maintenance, it is essential that the generation
of the acknowledgment be under the application's control, rather
than, for example, the TCP stack's.  Otherwise, race conditions
arise in which the notification sender will erroneously believe
the information has been processed (e.g., written to disk) by the
receiver.

>  Without specific features in the protocol which would
>  need app-level ACKs (such as data model version negotiation),
>  the cost and complexity of this feature cannot be justified.
...

This is based on the premise that the sole reason for application
level acknowledgment is confirmation that it could "understand"
the data.  For logging applications, this is neither necessary nor sufficient.

Randy

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