[IPFIX] Encoding of Boolean values in draft-ietf-ipfix-text-adt

Dear all,

The open question is: What is the best textual encoding for Boolean values in flow records?

Here are the alternatives discussed so far:

1. true: "1", false: "0"
Pro: very common, used by several programming languages, international (not language-specific)
Con:  0 may be misinterpreted as "don't know"

2. true: "true", false: "false"
Pro: very common, unambiguous, used by several programming languages, 
Con:  not international: English language-specific

3. true:"1", false: "2"
Pro: in line with SMI encoding for Booleans
Con: unknown outside of SNMP community. Not intuitively clear which is true and which is false

4. true: "t"*, false: "f"*
Con: may be confusing or misleading.

Writing now as technical contributor, I would eliminate option #4 because I do not see any advantage of this alternative. #3 has only a weak "pro" being used by SMI.  Thus, we should either choose #1 or #2. Here, I would go for #1 because it is not language-specific.

Cheers,
    Juergen




> -----Original Message-----
> From: IPFIX [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Paul Aitken
> Sent: Dienstag, 11. Februar 2014 22:32
> To: Brian Trammell
> Cc: IPFIX Working Group
> Subject: Re: [IPFIX] Fwd: New Version Notification for draft-ietf-ipfix-text-
> adt-01.txt
> 
> Brian,
> 
> Aside from the fact that this is English-specific, it works for me.
> 
> P.
> 
> 
> > Aside from the fact that these aren't case-insensitive (which at least causes
> an error as opposed to a non-detected incorrect acceptance), I'd say we
> could combine these:
> >
> > true = ('t' | 'T') 0*ALPHA
> >
> > false = ('f' | 'F') 0*ALPHA
> >
> > i.e., the decoder only looks at the first letter for [tT] or [fF], probably with a
> note that "true" and "false" are the preferred encodings.
> 
> 
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