You are right that "community responsibility" is a bit nebulous. What we need to do is setup a community place or places where people can meet up online or in person (at relatively frequent intervals) to work on modeling. The open source communities do this via virtual and real "hackathons" -- which are what we've setup just as part of official IETF meetings. I set one up at the previous ODL dev meetup, and will do so going forward as well as part of a few well attended conferences. Other ideas (and help!) for these is appreciated.
--Tom
Hi Tom,
In light of the numerous YANG models these days, there is the YANG
doctors scaling issue. You're right, even if the number of YANG
doctors recently increased, we need other venues to provide advice
to YANG model designers. This should solve the issue of designing
properly the YANG models.
On the other hand, there is a bigger issue, IMO: the proper
coordination of those YANG models. This is not the YANG doctors
responsibility. This can't be: see the YANG doctors scalability
issue. So who's responsibility is this? Simply asserting "it's
the community responsibility" is the easy answer, but I'm afraid
it will not work.
Regards, Benoit
One of the things that came up in a number of discussions
I had in Hawaii and afterwards was around the coordination and
encouragement topics. A number of people commented both during
these discussions (and I think someone did during one of the
Netmod sessions) that the “MIB Doctor” model we are using is not
going to scale out to the numbers of Yang models that are in
need of advice or review, nor will be scale in terms of
progressing models through the IETF’s RFC process. The fact is
that we simply do not have enough Yang Doctors to cover all of
the models in question, despite our best efforts. It is for
this reason that I strongly encourage other venues of review and
advice such as a continued “advice” or “Yangathon” session at
each IETF meeting going forward, as well as encouraging a
loosening of the interim WG meeting rules to encourage more
meetings, as well as perhaps less formalized ones. I also
encourage the IETF to start pairing up with other organizations
such as OpenDaylight, Openstack and OP-NFV and join their
Yangathons there.
—Tom
Hi Jari,
Let me open the discussion.
What is important at this point in time is the
coordination of those YANG models.
All of them come at the same time, and this required
some urgent attention.
Focusing on the routing YANG models with "Rtg-yang-coord@xxxxxxxx"
<Rtg-yang-coord@xxxxxxxx> is a step in the
right direction. Indeed the community needs to agree on
how to model IGPs, BGP, the topology, etc...
However, the coordination should also occur with the
data models developed in other IETF WGs. And the IETF
might need to reach out to different SDOs/consortia.
As the operators told me: we can't afford to develop
those data models independently from each others.
Regards, Benoit
Thanks for writing this article, Benoit!
The wave of new data models is obviously interesting and exciting. But I wanted to open a discussion with you all on what we should do with regards to serving this need better. Is there something that we could do better at the IETF to be able deal with this new work?
Jari
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