Re: Another SMIv2 question

[Juergen Schoenwaelder <schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>]

>>>>> Robert Moore writes:

[...]

Robert> Second, while I have no objections at all to this new way of
Robert> using Counter64's, I do worry about these silent, de facto
Robert> amendments to the SMI.  We can say we'll "get it all right" in
Robert> sming, but meanwhile, how is someone supposed to know what the
Robert> rules are for defining a semantically valid MIB module?

I hope that SMIng will not have these kind of rules at all. This rule
is an example of an IETF policy rule which should be defined in a
guidelines document rather than being hard-wired in the language
itself. Note that nothing breaks in terms of interoperability or
Counter semantics if you change or remove this rule. So moving these
IETF policy rules out of the SMI into a guidelines document allows to
adapt these rules over time.

Not sure what we do until we have SMIng in place. Perhaps we need a
guidelines document for SMIv2 as well which says "this is the policy
rule defined in 1999 as part of SMIv2 but this how we now look at the
issue and this is the new policy rule".

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder      Technical University Braunschweig
<schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>  Dept. Operating Systems & Computer Networks
Phone: +49 531 391 3289    Muehlenpfordtstr. 23, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany
Fax:   +49 531 391 5936    <http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/~schoenw/>