Re: I-D ACTION:draft-kulkarni-netconf-subagent-prot-00.txt

[Andy Bierman <ietf@andybierman.com>]

Martin Bjorklund wrote:
> Andy Bierman <ietf@andybierman.com> wrote:
> > The WG is not going to standardize a sub-agent protocol,
>
> If the WG does not want to work on a subagent protocol, that's fine.
>
> I just want to say that I do think the subagent idea (in general) is
> appealing, and I know for a fact that subagents will be used in some
> netconf deployments.
>
> > The complexity required for robust <edit-config> support
> > is just huge.
>
> I don't think it is.  XPath filtering across subagents is more
> tricky...

I think it would be almost as much work to write this document
as it was to write the netconf-prot document.  In practice,
the capabilities and operations will not be the same across
all sub-agents.  All the bells and whistles (error-option,
confirmed-commit, etc.), for all the operations seems like
a lot of complexity to me.




> > And what about special RPCs like <reset-interfaces>
> > which might be implemented across multiple sub-agents?
>
> This might be another reason for using a standard <exec> method (where
> the operation itself is defined in the data model) as been discussed
> earlier.

My point was that if every RPC is to be supported,
then a generalized algorithm would be needed to
define how it is properly invoked in the presence
of multiple sub-agents.  IMO, this is difficult.
It is hard enough to define the algorithm for
RPC methods we know about (like <edit-config>),
but what about any arbitrary RPC?  I don't
think <exec> really helps here, unless the contents
of the exec command are tightly constrained.



> /martin

Andy



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