Subject: Washington Issue 3 - Packages adding Properties to root

From: Brian Rosen <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 1999 10:13:16 -0500

A number of issues were raised in the Washington meeting that were "send to
the
list".  This is one of these issues, with the problem and my suggested fix.

Problem:
Some packages need a property which is the same for all terminations that
implement the package.  Quantity of is an example, or bandwidth perhaps.

Suggested Solution
The solution presented in the meeting was to allow a package to define
properties of the root termination as well as properties, events, signals
and statistics of terminations that realize the package.  It is currently
possible to define
an entire package as realized by root.

Please Note:
I am not all that comfortable with this solution.  One problem is that there
are cases where the value is not "one per gateway".  It might be "one per
interface".
More precisely, such properties are not really gateway wide, they are a
property of the set of terminations implementing the package.

An alternative is to simply have conventions that allow a property to appear
in a termination, but have a global value - if it were read/write (many are
read only)
if it were written in one termination, it that value would show up in an
audit
of any other termination.

---

From: Abdallah Rayhan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 1999 14:46:07 -0500

Brian,

That is easy. Let gateway properties be qualified by ROOT and interface
properties qualified by network type. For example, if the package
implements a root property then it would be, pkg/root/property and
if it is network type then, pkg/ATM/property. We have the concept of
static extension between packages. That is a package extends another
one when being defined. We could relax that to allow packages to extend
the root package dynamically but within the scope of the package. So
pkg/root/propertyA is a root property in all terminations implementing
pkg. Other terminations which do not implement this package, basically,
dont access that property.

One restriction applies here which should apply to all packages
that is not overloading of root package properties.

Abdallah Rayhan