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Re: comments on draft-ietf-netconf-notification-01.txt

David B Harrington wrote:

....
I think a verb-based approach is associated with the more advanced
procedural style. I am of the impression that operators would prefer
to move from the antiquated peek-poke method of SNMP to a task-based
procedural approach (verb-based), akin to that used by CLI. 

I'm confused.
What do you think <edit-config> <get-config> <commit> etc. are?
These are the standard verbs in netconf.

For the configuration components of notification generation,
we already have a set of verbs.



In a private email, somebody made this observation:
"In all my years of doing SNMP work, I never saw the
immediate uptake and commitment of real dollars to
an I-D, like I saw for netconf.  It's because dev-groups
all over were already migrating their CLI to XML, and all
doing it differently.  Netconf is all about CLI, not SNMP.
The SNMP people don't understand that yet. ;-)"

I think I understand that. If Netconf is all about CLI, then it
appears that support for a verb/task-based approach is called for,
rather than the data-centric peek-poke approach of SNMP.



I think clueful vendors will figure out that XML (not netconf)
allows them an opportunity to finally build the kind of
structure and metadata into their CLI tree they have wanted
for a long time.

Netconf provides the standard set of verbs on that XML config data.




Of course, with that decision comes the possibly-unconstrained growth
of verbs often found in CLIs.
But that's the price of progress, just as the unconstrained growth of
functions written in Fortran/Pascal/C/etc was the price one paid for
moving away from assembly language.



I know examples of SW that did not run amok
with specialized functions, and spent the extra effort to
keep code-size down, code consistency and reuse up.
This often happens in embedded NE development where the
hardware platform is resource limited and dictated in advance.

The mindset is that these NE devices are used for processing
packets, not XML documents.  IMO, embedded engineers will
never change -- their mission is to keep COGS costs down.
Adding hardware (such as memory) has to be cost-justified.
Moving lots of code from one cheap workstation to 1000's of
embedded agents is not usually done, for this very reason.




To be continued ...

dbh






Andy

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