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

Juergen,

The values in option 1 conflict with the RFC 7011 (IPFIX Protocol) 
boolean encoding definition, which says:

6.1.5.  boolean

    The boolean data type is specified according to the TruthValue in
    [RFC2579].  It is encoded as a single-octet integer per
    Section 6.1.1,with the value 1 for true and value 2 for false.
    Every other value is undefined.


Option 3 provides the benefits of consistency with RFC 7011, and no 
conversion required between the RFC 7011 and text-adt formats.

Expressed another way: the IPFIX WG group already decided the boolean 
encoding. Although we might not like that definition now, we should 
consistently use the same encoding across all the IPFIX RFCs.

P.


On 26/02/2014 10:18, Juergen Quittek wrote:
> 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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