Subject: [OPSAWG] MUD: open issue: controller v. my-controller

From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2017 16:47:38 +0100

Hi everyone,

I am getting ready to rev the draft and a few issues have come up as we
get a little more experience.  Here's one to chew on.  Currently the
draft specifies a "controller" class that is a URI.  That URI could be a
URN that describes standard behavior or it could just be an open class. 
The problem with the open class is that the administrator really won't
understand what it's for unless the URI has some descriptive name. 
Still, having standard classes and behaviors is useful, and having a
flexible controller approach is useful if we can sort the UI issues.

In the department of making it easier on the administrator, however,
there is already a display element for a device.  One thing we can do is
allow for a class "my-controller", where devices register (or are
registered) out of band for a given type of device.  Here the UI
elements are simpler.  If someone goes and looks at all devices that are
associated with a MUD-URI, they can then just also see one place as to
what controllers are associated with them.  This is a bit of a general case.

My first proposal is to therefore re-add (it was in there) the
"my-controller" empty element into the YANG model.  This is easy enough
and costs almost nothing, and makes the UI much simpler.

My second proposal is not to remove the "controller" component, but to
modify it to be a grouping of some form that consists of a URI, much as
it is today, and a display element associated with the URI.  This will
allow for the standard behaviors already defined as well as some
non-standard, as we gain more experience.

Comments/concerns?

Eliot

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From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2017 14:55:25 +0100

Well, foist on my own petard.  We've run into a small issue with the
following:

> non-standard, as we gain more experience.

This runs us into internationalization issues.  Therefore that
documentation must be external, and "controller" alone should be used
with care.  I've added some text around that for the next version.

Eliot