Hi Juergen, Andy,

With an author/contributor hat on ...

It is unclear to me, from an RFC document perspective, what is being proposed 
here, and appreciate that each of you may have different thoughts as to what is 
being proposed.

E.g., are you proposing:
 (1) That the yang module versioning draft should update RFC 7950 to define a 
yang version "1.2" or "2.0" label, but still keeps the new extensions defined 
in a separate module?
 (2) The same as (1) but also changing the statements to be part of the formal 
YANG language (but still in separate documents that update RFC 7950)?
 (3) To do an RFC 7950-bis for YANG 1.2/2.0, that strictly only includes the 
module versioning work?  E.g., leaving the semantic version numbers as a 
separate draft. 
 (4) To look at YANG 1.2/2.0 in a wider scope, and consider this work alongside 
the other 100 proposed issues/enhancements 
(https://github.com/netmod-wg/yang-next/issues), for the next version of YANG.
 (5) something else ...

My overriding concern here is that there is a pretty clear industry support for 
accepting that non-backwards-compatible changes do sometimes occur and whilst 
it is entirely appropriate for them to be minimized, it is still helpful to 
have a way to accurately indicate when they do occur.  Depending on what the 
actual work is, I think that doing (1) or (2) might take another 4-8 months, 
doing (3) might take 8-12 months, and doing (4) could be another 5 years, and 
it is worth noting that the first draft bringing Semver to IETF was by Benoit 6 
years ago.  I.e., we have already been working on this for a long time.

After the previous module-versioning last-call we attempted to refine the draft 
further to make the functionality more optional, specifically, changing the 
semantics of "recommended-min" for imports to make it suggestive guidance 
rather than changing the actual import behaviour.  So, my reading is that the 
core changes to the YANG specification by this document are really those 
definition in section 3, and I think that these can be mitigated via a CLI 
option to tools that are performing comparisons of YANG modules.

Pragmatically, I would like to see the WG publish these as separate RFCs, in 
the format that they are now, to get this work completed, so that we can move 
on.  Once the versioning work is complete, then I think that it would be 
helpful for the WG to consider doing a rev of RFC 7950, that should include 
this versioning work (including defining formal YANG keywords rather than 
extension keywords) and also evaluate whether some of the other 
proposals/enhancements tracked on github should be considered, along with 
trying to clean up the documents, e.g., moving the NETCONF protocol specific 
parts out of the base YANG spec, moving the XML encoding into its own separate 
document.

Regards,
Rob


> -----Original Message-----
> From: netmod <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Jürgen Schönwälder
> Sent: 13 May 2023 23:14
> To: Andy Bierman <[email protected]>
> Cc: NetMod WG <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [netmod] Comments on draft-ietf-netmod-yang-module-
> versioning-09
> 
> On Sat, May 13, 2023 at 01:13:06PM -0700, Andy Bierman wrote:
> >
> > The only correct way to remove MUST/MUST NOT from the "YANG
> contract"
> > is to introduce a new YANG language version (1.2), and make a new
> contract.
> 
> +1
> 
> > Ironically, the WG seems to understand the importance of proper
> management
> > for NBC changes in YANG content, but not the YANG language itself.
> 
> yup
> 
> /js
> 
> --
> Jürgen Schönwälder              Constructor University Bremen gGmbH
> Phone: +49 421 200 3587         Campus Ring 1 | 28759 Bremen | Germany
> Fax:   +49 421 200 3103         <https://constructor.university/>
> 
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