Re: text format of configurations

[Bill Woodcock <woody@pch.net>]

    > User interface has generally been a space 
    > that the IETF stayed out of.

I agree.  If vendors come up with uniform syntax themselves, there's no
reason for anyone else to become involved.  I think that would make
everyone happiest.  I hadn't been thinking of an IETF document specifying
syntax, but I can imagine some sort of standards document specifying
verbose namespace, equivalent to OIDs.  And even equivalencies, for
multiple-human-language-support and so forth.  Um, I'd better shut up now,
before I get too far into bad-idea-fairyland.  :-)

    > 2) If there are new features, there is no way that you can expect multiple 
    > vendors to create the exact same syntax for controlling these 
    > features.  This implies that even if everyone buys into the goal of 
    > uniformity, it will not be perfectly achieved.

My thought on that was that something kind of like the OID vendor space
(sorry, I know I don't know SNMP terminology) but verbose, and with a
long-term pressure toward convergence, was what might be needed.  For
example, any vendor could come up with any new command that they liked, so
long as it was prefixed by the string "vendor-experimental-".  As soon as
they could convince their fellow vendors to standardize on it, they could
pull that prefix off.  Ugly, but only for the vendors who don't converge.

                                -Bill