Subject: tools forum idea for IETF 98

From: Alia Atlas <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Feb 2017 14:30:44 -0500

There have been some discussions about having a meeting at IETF 98 to
discuss existing experimental tools and encourage discussion among those
working on tools to handle specific issues.  The basic meeting description
is

Tools are a critical mechanism through which IETF work can be done with
less effort.  Some IETF tools (e.g. datatracker, xml2rfc, etc.) are at a
high level of maturity and deployment.  Many other tools have either not
yet reached a maturity suitable for wide-spread use or struggle to spread
knowledge of their existence and use.   Still other potential tools are
merely partially brainstormed ideas looking for others motivated to
discuss, implement and try.  This meeting provides a mechanism to spread
knowledge of experimental tools to those interested and get feedback on
those tools.  It also provides time and focus for finding others interested
in particular tool ideas and discussing how to progress them.   It should
be augmented before IETF 98 with a wiki of experimental tool pointers and
tool ideas.

              Agenda:  30 minutes of new tools lightning talks
                            60 minutes of small group discussion on
different tool areas

If you would be interested in doing a lightning talk for a tool which
hasn't gained IETF-wide use, please let us know in the next week.

If you would be interested in facilitating discussion for a particular tool
area, please let us know in the next week.  If you are interested in
suggesting a tool area for discussion and want to be involved in that,
please let us know.

Once we understand what the interest level is in active participation, then
we can figure out how is best to organize this.

Thanks,
Alia Atlas & Robert Sparks

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 09 Feb 2017 12:58:41 -0500

Alia Atlas <[email-masked]> wrote:
    > discuss existing experimental tools and encourage discussion among
    > those working on tools to handle specific issues. The basic meeting
    > description is

I'm excited by this.
I probably know a dozen tools, but I don't know that I know about them.
Or rather, I'm probably ignorant that others don't know about them :-)

    > 60 minutes of small group discussion on different tool areas

Scheduling for this might be difficult.

Suggestion: once we get a few lightning talks in the "can", that each
            WG chairs luncheon start with one such <5minute talk.

--
Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>, Sandelman Software Works
 -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-

---

From: Alia Atlas <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2017 13:06:32 -0500

Hi Michael,

> Or rather, I'm probably ignorant that others don't know about them :-)

Exactly - and for some of them, it has been a couple years at least where
the knowledge
and use isn't spreading organically.

Which tools are you thinking of?   Personally, I just started writing a
draft in markdown & then
discovered that the WYSWYG web translator isn't working for me and poking
at github led to lots of dependencies.

>             WG chairs luncheon start with one such <5minute talk.

A goal of the small group discussion is to have folks find others
interested in the same
topic, understand what might be useful, and perhaps be motivated to do some
work on them
or volunteer to try them out as they are developed and so on.

So far, I've gotten a number of volunteers for lightning talks - certainly
more than 3 - and
a couple folks willing to facilitate small group discussion, but not
specific topics looking
like they have mass.   I'd be happy to see more discussion on this aspect.

I agree that scheduling is going to be tricky.  Options might include a
bring-your-own meal slot
or a before-dinner slot.  There's always scheduling it with lots of
conflicts like a non-WG-forming
BoF.

The audience isn't just WG chairs, of course, though I do hear your point
about having something
on-going about continuing tool experiments.  Let's see if this has enough
energy to try once and then see what makes sense afterwards.

Regards,
Alia

---

From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2017 13:19:22 -0500

Since its on topic, just thought I would mention that I have ported my
documentation and spec building tools to Linux and OSX. I do not yet have a
Linux installer but that will probably happen in a couple of months time.

https://github.com/hallambaker/PHB-Build-Tools

The code is all in C# which has just acquired a fully MIT Licensed open
source implementation. The tools can be used as standalone command line
tools or as integrated Visual Studio components. I use Visual Studio for my
build environment on every platform, Linux and OSX included. There is a
tool that will convert Visual Studio projects to Gnu Makefiles. The only
serious limitation being that I can't run unit tests on platforms other
than Windows at the moment.

OK so what tools?

First, I have my own RFC documentation tool that can take source from
MarkDown, Word, XML2RFC or HTML. It does not yet support the new format but
will in the near future.

Second, I have a protocol compiler that allows a protocol to be defined in
a very high level schema from which the reference sections of the
specification, examples, reference and production code are generated.

My approach is at a higher level of abstraction to YANG. I believe that the
process of designing a standard is to remove choices that don't matter.
There are hundreds of ways that an integer value can be encoded and DNS
uses at least 6 different forms. If you are designing a protocol you should
choose one and stick to it. I don't currently deal in YANG but if I had to,
YANG would be an output from my tools.

The same libraries also include an ASN.1 encoder (and partial decoder),
JSON, RFC822 and DNS serialization/deserialization tools.

The tool building tool is also included.