[Tinyos-devel] TEP 4 Shepherding

[Ben Greenstein]

I have been asked to shepherd TEP 4 for TinyOS 2.0.  This TEP concerns
the Active Message ID allocation for network protocols and
applications. (For those of you not familiar with TinyOS enhancement
protocols (TEPs), they serve as technical documentation for TinyOS
users as well as specifications for developers programming for TinyOS.
More detail is available on the TInyOS website.)

TEP 4 is available at:

http://tinyos.cvs.sourceforge.net/tinyos/tinyos-2.x/doc/txt/tep4.txt?view=markup

I sent a request for comments out to the community and got one response:

"It ... seems reasonable.  It actually makes a lot of sense to define
a range of network protocol "IDs" that are reserved for standard
TinyOS releases."

I had a couple comments of my own:

lines 58-59: "The AM ID may conflict with the protocols and
applications in the contrib tree." I'd say iff the contrib protool is
intended to replace the TinyOS protocol. I think the language is weird
in that an arbitrary contrib protocol can conflict with a blessed
TinyOS protocol.

lines 91-92: "The chair of the Network Protocol Working Group will
document the deallocation." I'd also say the chair has the right to do
the equivalent of requiring lease renewals, if the ID space gets
tight.

So I think the TEP can move forward without any changes, but would be
slightly better and clearer if it included my suggestions.

Best wishes,

Ben