Re: SMIng Requirements: instance identification

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

>>>>> Andrea Westerinen writes:

Andrea> In the end, these requirements need to reflect two points of
Andrea> consensus: 1. Is keying part of the model/language or is it
Andrea> part of the mapping?  2. If it is part of the model, what
Andrea> keying approach lends itself to the broadest possible set of
Andrea> mappings?

Even though I am now drifting into a different subject: The real
fundamental problem I have with the implicitly stated goal of "meeting
the broadest possible set of mappings". This points to a fundamental
difference between two groups of SMIng folks:

(a) There is a group of people who want to define a universal
    information modeling language which supports "the broadest
    possible set of mappings".

(b) There is another group of people who are much less ambitious.
    They simply want to primarily merge and replace (!) SMIv2 and SPPI
    in order to (i) reduce the total number of langauges we have by
    one and to (ii) reduce the total amount of work which is spend on
    definiting MIBs/PIBs in the IETF and elsewhere.

Depending on which group you belong to, the requirements look pretty
different. I personally belong to group (b) since I believe this is
the only complexity we can seriously handle.

I can only encourage people to try to take a MIB or PIB and to rewrite
it in such a way that all protocol related things are not visible in
the core data definition anymore and that the data definitions can be
mapped on both protocols equally well. My personaly experience with
trying this on some examples was interesting and a real eye opener.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder      Technical University Braunschweig
<schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>  Dept. Operating Systems & Computer Networks
Phone: +49 531 391 3289    Bueltenweg 74/75, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany
Fax:   +49 531 391 5936    <URL:http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/~schoenw/>