Rob,

I can see the attraction in allowing both. It has a major drawback, though. If 
the mac address is used as a key in lists, it could easily happen that two 
values that differ only in hyphen/colonization would be accepted into the same 
list as distinct. That might break quite a few use cases.

I don't really care which notation is used, but FWIW googling for "mac address 
format hyphen" and "mac address format colon" gives about 5 times more hits for 
the latter.

Best Regards,
/jan


> On 1 Apr 2020, at 12:20, Rob Wilton (rwilton) 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> RFC 6991 defines MAC address using colons:
>  
>      typedef mac-address {
>        type string {
>          pattern '[0-9a-fA-F]{2}(:[0-9a-fA-F]{2}){5}';
>        }
>        description
>         "The mac-address type represents an IEEE 802 MAC address.
>          The canonical representation uses lowercase characters.
>  
>          In the value set and its semantics, this type is equivalent
>          to the MacAddress textual convention of the SMIv2.";
>        reference
>         "IEEE 802: IEEE Standard for Local and Metropolitan Area
>                    Networks: Overview and Architecture
>          RFC 2579 <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2579>: Textual Conventions 
> for SMIv2";
>      }
>  
> IEEE has their own definition using dashes instead of colons, i.e. the 
> pattern is "[0-9a-fA-F]{2}(-[0-9a-fA-F]{2}){5}".
>  
> E.g. from 
> https://github.com/YangModels/yang/blob/master/standard/ieee/draft/802/ieee802-types.yang
>  
> <https://github.com/YangModels/yang/blob/master/standard/ieee/draft/802/ieee802-types.yang>
>  
> There has been some suggestion from folks in IEEE that they would like us to 
> deprecate the IETF definition and migrate to the IEEE definition.  However, 
> this would end up being an NBC change and doesn’t seem to be great from an 
> interoperability POV.
>  
> Another, possibly more pragmatic, suggestion would be the change both 
> definitions to accept either “:” or “-“.   I.e. the pattern statement would 
> become:  "[0-9a-fA-F]{2}([-:][0-9a-fA-F]{2}){5}";
>  
> What are folk’s opinions of including this change in RFC 6991bis?
>  
> Thanks,
> Rob 
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