[j-nsp] Netconf & namespaces

[Phil Mayers]

All,

We've got some code to talk junoscript, but it's run into problems 
because the XML parser turns out to not reliably deliver start/end tag 
events to upper layers - it is dependent on the "chunking" of input data :o(

To sidestep this difficulty, I started to look at Netconf, which of 
course is separate XML documents rather than one long-lived one, so 
flushing the parser at the ]]>]]> delimiter is easy.

Literally the very first thing I noticed is that JunOS doesn't put a 
namespace on the <hello> tag:

<!-- No zombies were killed during the creation of this user interface -->
<!-- user admin, class j-super-user -->
<hello>
   <capabilities>

This of course fails to validate against the .xsd schema in Appendix B 
of RFC4741 or 6241, and makes me sad. Similarly, it'll happily take 
<rpc> documents without the correct namespace, though it seems to always 
namespace <rpc-reply>

(
Other vendors do different variations - Cisco IOS never namespaces 
anything, NX-OS namespaces everything, and so on.

What, honestly, is the point of XML namespaces? No-one ever gets them 
right,
)

Anyway, the actual question - is anyone using Netconf in anger against 
JunOS, and if so, how do you handle namespaces? Do you just ignore the 
fact that JunOS is broken for <hello>? Are there other places where the 
namespaces aren't handled according to spec?