Display BGP gateway mode in show protocol output

[Alexander Zubkov]

Hi everybody,

This thread has awaken some evil thoughts I have had since long ago. I know
this might be forbidden here, but still, I could not sleep well until I did
it. Please don't beat me for that. :)
So here is the patch (applies to "thread-next" branch). It is definitely
ugly, ineffective, untested, requires a lot of polishing, etc. It was
mostly created as a proof of concept for now. It seems to be working at
least on my simple tests with device, kernel, pipe, bgp protocols. With it
you can send "json protocols" command and get a dump of protocols in JSON.
It also adds "-q" option to cli to hide the "BIRD ..." header, so you can
do things like:

$ ./birdc -q "json protocols" | jq '.protocols.bgp1.Channels.ipv4["Gateway
mode"]'
"recursive"

I know we all long for a great API to come. But unitl that we sill have to
parse the text cli output. So why not to parse for example JSON isntead? :)
It is safer to extend and not to break compatibility with text parsers.
This and other benefits are mostly well-known. Of course it is ugly piece
of code added to the codebase, that needs to be maintained, etc. All the
minuses has also been well described here already. Anyway, I do not expect
it to be included upstream, just had some strange need to do this coding
exercise. :) On the other hand if it looks appealing, I can polish/improve
it if needed. Also "routes" variant could be added.
Any feedback is welcome! And I can give more comments on the contents, of
course.

PS. Also another idea has come to my mind. What BIRD team think about
introducing a practice of adding experimental features, i.e. those that
have no guarantee to remain compatible between versions, or to remain at
all. It is often said that adding new features is a hard process because
they need to be maintained, harden merges between versions, need thourough
study right away because further redesign can break compatibility. So I
think calling it experimental and giving yourself an opportunity to "undo"
it, could break the tie and give some "sandbox" for the feature to mature
or perish.

PPS. I'm not advocating my json patch with that idea. :)

Regards,
Alexander

On Wed, Sep 10, 2025 at 1:02 PM Douglas Fischer <fischerdouglas at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> https://gitlab.nic.cz/labs/uytc/-/blob/dirty/examples/00_leaf/expected.output
> 😍
>
> Em ter., 9 de set. de 2025 às 20:56, Maria Matejka via Bird-users <
> bird-users at network.cz> escreveu:
>
>> Hola!
>>
>> With that, there is some internal tooling work on the way (because people
>> around Netconf didn’t bother to think about performance, let aside
>> maintainability) and as soon we have this, at least an experimental API is
>> gonna be there quite fast.
>>
>> The actual tooling is UYTC YANG To Code which should enable you to
>>
>> Doing google (not the best for this atm) on “UYTC YANG To Code” returns a
>> I mistyped this it must be UTC YANG … the rest of the returned data is
>> utterly garbage , Is there a url for this tooling you speak of ?
>>
>> Well, there is just a git repo with pieces of code in a very
>> being-worked-on state. Not much to actually see for now, there are just
>> several branches of dirty python code for now.
>>
>> https://gitlab.nic.cz/labs/uytc/
>>
>> Yet, this thing is, in the end, going to have a module for creating C
>> code. But first we have to digest through all the funky RFCs around YANG,
>> CBOR and whatever else blocks us, including drafting some new stuff, to
>> make everything actually fly the reasonable way.
>>
>> Once, Donald E. Knuth said: »So, I just have this philosophy that there
>> will be always some people who are more interested in quality than others,
>> and I wanted to make TeX good for them.« (pg. 349
>> https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb17-4/tb53knun.pdf)
>>
>> And we wanna make this right, and minimize the oversights which would be
>> too late to fix later. The original architecture of BIRD was good for 20
>> years, saved us a lot of hair, and many parts of it are actually still
>> there.
>>
>> Maria
>>
>> –
>> Maria Matejka (she/her) | BIRD Team Leader | CZ.NIC, z.s.p.o.
>>
>
>
> --
> Douglas Fernando Fischer
> Engº de Controle e Automação
>
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