Undocumented use of gNMI Notification field `atomic`

[earies]

A gNMI Notification message contains a boolean field named atomic per:

https://github.com/openconfig/gnmi/blob/master/proto/gnmi/gnmi.proto#L89-L91

  // This notification contains a set of paths that are always updated together
  // referenced by a globally unique prefix.
  bool atomic = 6;

However the comments above are where this definition ends and is left to interpretation. The gNMI specification does not carry any additional definition or desired usage.

Now this could be interpreted a few ways it seems:

1. Set the value to true for any YANG model structure that carries the oc-ext:telemetry-atomic annotation essentially just reflecting a boolean signal according to the data content
2. Set the value to true per the comment when a prefix is carried in the Notification message indicating that all Update messages as part of the Notification "conform" to the prefix concatenation

The latter is completely unnecessary as the existence of a prefix is enough to know that all subsequent Update messages packed into that Notification are part of the same prefix

The prior means that there is a direct correspondence to the data-model annotation.

Is this value necessary? How is it intended to be used or of value to a consumer?

Thx