Re: comments on draft-presuhn-referent-00.txt

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

>>>>> Margaret Wasserman writes:

Margaret> Are you suggesting that we come up with a single choice for
Margaret> all MIB pointers/references?  Or that MIBs should explicitly
Margaret> list which one they use in a description clause?

I would just like to get the options and the pros and cons documented
so that MIB authors can make a good choice.

Margaret> SNMP/SMIv2 doesn't seem to present a good model for handling
Margaret> complex internally-referential data structures, and I have
Margaret> some fundamental misgivings about whether the semantics of
Margaret> SNMP are sufficient to support writes/adds/deletes to
Margaret> complex data structures at all.

References between data structures are (a) unavoidable and (b) always
a pain to deal with. Any serious simplification comes from either
restricting what you can do or having some support on the boxes. But
if implementing reference counting or similar things is already too
high of a cost, what can we do?

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder    <http://www.informatik.uni-osnabrueck.de/schoenw/>