On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 8:26 AM, Christian Hopps <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > > On Oct 20, 2018, at 1:55 PM, Joe Clarke <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > * New requirement 1.4 for supporting over-arching software releases > > This text? 1.4 The solution MUST allow for modules to be versioned by software release. In particular, backwards-compatible enhancements and bug fixes MUST be allowed in any non-latest release. IMO these requirements are mostly intended to legitimize bad practices be server vendors, entirely at the expense of client developers. It is clear that SEMVER is required to support this requirement to treat every platform as an isolated release of what are supposed to be shared modules. The revision date no longer identifies the latest (e.g, 1.6.1 could have a newer date than 1.9.0) However, SEMVER becomes less useful if 1.6.1 actually has more features than 1.9.0. YANG clients already have to deal with different variants (revision, features, deviations) on every server, so it would be easy to think that all these server variants are not a new problem. However, this only applies to parsing incoming data. A client that is designed to formulate requests against specific data models is greatly harmed by a lack of server consistency. If YANG is ever going to grow up, the 3rd party client development needs to be taken more seriously. Andy [ I read this as supporting various different module versions based on a > vendor's different software release trains. If this is wrong then the rest > of this doesn't apply and I would just ask for the text to be update to > clarify what it means. ] > > How many operators/users have asked for this or indicated it's a > requirement for them? > > What problem is intractable without this requirement being met, and what > is the cost of this requirement on the actual users? > > I have pushed back multiple times on this b/c I believe this "requirement" > is really being pushed to make it easier for vendors (a small affected > group) to develop their software at the cost of their users (the much > larger affected group) who would then have to deal with multiple trains of > the same module. > > Here is what I am afraid the vendors want here: A developer on release > train X can easily change some data structure and then push the change into > an automated system which generates a new YANG module definition and revs a > version number -- all done! They don't have to deal with the inertia of > making this change in their release train Y or Z and they don't have to > treat modules as a stable API they are exporting, b/c they now have these > new wonderful versions from this work. Meanwhile we the users now have to > deal with N forks with all the various little incompatible changes random > developers at the company wanted to make without having to coordinate with > their coworkers/other internal teams. Now multiply this by M vendors. It's > a nightmare. It shouldn't be what we are optimizing for, let alone making a > requirement. > > We already have features and deviations why are they not enough to deal > with functionality that is present or not in various software > release/devices? > > FWIW I'm not against making it easier to develop software, but we have to > be mindful if we are just pushing the cost (and magnifying it greatly) to > other people in the community. > > Thanks, > Chris. > > _______________________________________________ > netmod mailing list > [email protected] > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/netmod >
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