[j-nsp] NETCONF in Junos

[Phil Shafer]

Phil Mayers writes:
>What's the cause of the few/occasional commands where "| dis xml rpc" 
>doesn't work (e.g. "show virtual-chassis | display xml rpc")? I'm 
>assuming CLI must know how to format it as XML to send it to MGD.

I'll take a look when I get back from break.  The one's I know that
have issues with are in two classes: those with functionality written
in the CLI (interactive commands) and those that use odd features
that don't normally require rendering.  The second class is rare
but annoying.  An example would be "show route advertising-protocol
bgp 10.1.2.3", which uses a mechanism for nesting parameters, which
are awkward and rarely used.  There's a PR for this and we're fixing
it.  I've not heard of an issue with "show virtual-chassis", and
it does not fit into either of these two classes.  Not good.

>FWIW the only two things I can cite as dislikes are the 
>infinite-stream-of-XML for Junoscript (solved in Netconf of course) and 
>the somewhat inexplicable embeddeing of the running software version (as 
>opposed to a semantic version) into the various /junos-* XML namespaces, 
>which makes them a bit of a bore to process with a namespace-strict XML 
>library.

This "simple document view" was one of the things we wanted to fix
when we took our XML API to the IETF, along with a framing mechanism
and some more flexible namespace constructs.  Initially we only got
one out of three addressed, but have finally gotten a framing
mechanism (in rfc6242) and YANG will allow us to move away from
version-specific namespace.  It's definitely taken too long to get
there, but it's happening.

Thanks,
 Phil