Alex,

Not sure if this only has to do with "practical limitations providing a CLI 
interface"...   In a machine-to-machine interface this is less of a problem but 
in a human-to-machine interface it seems a bit impractical to me to find a 
solution for a problem to scroll through a list of 100+ completions if an 
operator would ask for the possible completion in case he does not know what to 
provide as input.  There are ways to limit this output but it can be solved on 
a modelling level as well.  As I indicated identities can be conditional to a 
feature and if implementations choose not to implement a set of interface-type 
related features the list becomes (a whole lot) shorter "by itself".  Now 
iana-if-type is just a collection of all interface types that have been defined 
once without any kind of "structure".

Regards, Bart

-----Original Message-----
From: Ladislav Lhotka [mailto:lho...@nic.cz] 
Sent: Friday, April 6, 2018 9:55 AM
To: Alex Campbell <alex.campb...@aviatnet.com>; Bogaert, Bart (Nokia - 
BE/Antwerp) <bart.boga...@nokia.com>; netmod@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [netmod] An abundant amount of IANA if types...

Hi,

I have argued several times in the past that the IANA interface list (and, for 
that matter, the iana-if-type module) is a useless pile of rubbish because

- for some interface classes (Ethernet, tunnels) it is way too coarse-grained

- on the other hand, it contains a lot of stuff that nobody will ever use

- using the cabalistic (and wrong, in fact) name "ethernetCsmacd" for Ethernet 
is outright stupid

- YANG identities allow for encoding important relationships in interface 
types,in the flat list all this information is lost 

- as you say, implementing the iana-if-type module means that all interface 
types listed therein become valid.

So yes, I do believe that it would be useful if authoritative expert groups 
develop a better structure of interface type identities.

Lada
  
On Thu, 2018-04-05 at 23:59 +0000, Alex Campbell wrote:
> I haven't seen any previous discussions on the topic, but we have a 
> similar problem.
> Note this is not really to do with YANG itself, so much as the 
> practical limitations of the software package that provides our CLI interface.
> In NETCONF, the existence of extra unused identities doesn't pose any problem.
> 
> From: netmod <netmod-boun...@ietf.org> on behalf of Bogaert, Bart 
> (Nokia -
> BE/Antwerp) <bart.boga...@nokia.com>
> Sent: Thursday, 5 April 2018 8:21 p.m.
> To: netmod@ietf.org
> Subject: [netmod] An abundant amount of IANA if types...
>  
> Hi,
>  
> We were wondering if it would make sense to introduce features in the 
> IANA if types YANG model to enable grouping of related interface 
> types.  This would allow implementations to include only the types it 
> really requires (by supporting the related features but not the 
> others) and (in case of a CLI
> interface) would reduce the possible completions if an operator would 
> ask for the possible values of the type of an interface.
> Has this ever been considered/discussed?
>  
> Best regards,
> Bart
> _______________________________________________
> netmod mailing list
> netmod@ietf.org
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/netmod
--
Ladislav Lhotka
Head, CZ.NIC Labs
PGP Key ID: 0xB8F92B08A9F76C67
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