Re: Methods, Inheritance, Exceptions, etc. (was: Re: Methods in SMIng ?)

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

>>>>> Andrea Westerinen writes:

Andrea> Juergen, You say ... "I am looking for someone who shows a
Andrea> concrete proposal how a generic method signature maps to our
Andrea> current set of SNMP protocol operations."

Andrea> I agree - but view the "workarounds" first as an existence
Andrea> proof that this support is needed, and that it can be done.
Andrea> Also, I view these proposals as possible mechanisms that
Andrea> should be discussed as to their pros and cons.  I do not want
Andrea> to rathole on a proposal at this time, when the issue is
Andrea> whether procedure signatures (moving to Frank's term) are
Andrea> required.

Andrea> Since there are cases where these are already used in MIBs,
Andrea> and where most folks acknowledge that cleaner semantics would
Andrea> be helpful, I believe that these are a requirement.  Next, we
Andrea> can move to the mechanism.

We are after all formulating requirements for SMIng to be addressed by
the SMIng working group under the SMIng charter.

I continue to believe that methods require special protocol support
unless we go for what I would call a really really ugly hack. Note
that the SMIng WG is not supposed to do protocol work.

I still doubt that requiring methods _now_ for SMIng makes sense - it
might lead (a) to a mechanism we really do not want or (b) to a
situation where we do not finish SMIng or (c) to a situation where you
can specify methods but the definition is just mapped to nothing.

/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/>