Hi all,
On Thursday 24 April 2008 09.22.22 Tom.Petch wrote:
The people who believe that YANG is more expressive and better suited
for this poarticular purpose include contributors to the design of
SMIv2, MIB Doctors, members of the NMRG who helped develop the SMING
information and data modeling language, contributors to the SMIng WG
which worked on developing a proposed SMIv3 to converge the SMIv2
standard and the SPPI data modeling language standard and the NMRG
SMING approach, and engineers who have multiple independent
implementations of running code for Netconf data modeling.
Sounds magnificent but who are these people and where are they?
Do you want me to list them? If you want to know who's going to work on the
topic, I suggest you first look at the list of people on
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ngo/current/msg00745.html
and thereafter add people like Andy Bierman and Jürgen Schönwälder.
I don't think it's particularly strange that most of the YANG traffic has been
from a small group of people. We have had zero official status in the IETF
up to now, although the list has been hosted on ietf.org. The document has
been worked on by the people behind YANG, so they're obviously the ones who
know it best.
If you want numbers... the YANG gang itself is 6 people, from 4 companies and
one university. The internal discussions have been intense. The charter
discussion group included 11 other people representing a bunch of other
interests. That group sent 575 mail messages from March 14 through April 7
and everyone participated.
Do I think everyone's going to be very active in an eventual WG? No. But do
I think we'll have critical mass? Absolutely.
The O&M community _really_ cares about this issue. Frankly, I haven't seen
the kind of energy in this particular part of the IETF in many many years.
We _must_ get a standard in place so we can stop answering this question, "How
do I model in NETCONF?" with, "Do whatever you want since there's no
standard."
I do track the YANG and NGO mailing lists and what I see there worries me.
I see a significant number of questions along the lines; of what does this
mean, how can this ever work, how can I do ... and the questions are all
very reasonable and need answers - which they mostly get, even if they are
somewhat too often along the lines of 'oh dear', or 'more work needed'.
Naturally, more work is needed. That's why we want a working group...
But they are the sort of questions I, for all I have done with SMI, ASN.1
and other languages, would not have thought to ask; they come from someone
at the sharp end writing code for today's boxes. Yet these questions are
almost all coming from just one person with a specific market place, and if
he can find so many doubts and queries, how many more are there waiting to
be discovered?
That one person - hi, Andy! - is doing a magnificent job but for a new
language to live up to its billing, we need half a dozen such people, from
different parts of O&M to find the holes; and I just do not see them, at
least not on the YANG and NGO mailing lists.
There are at least three NETCONF implementers on the list (in the YANG gang),
plus a large cross-section of the O&M community at the IETF. See the numbers
above. Perhaps I'm thick, but I don't see how this _doesn't_ qualify as
critical mass.
The answers, likewise, mostly come from the same three or so people; again,
I am concerned that there are not more, given the claims of yang.
This causes me to doubt that we, the IETF, really has the community of
interest to undertake such a challenging assignment.
And, given the above, I have no doubt whatsoever.
Cheers,
David
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