Re: WG Last Call draft-ietf-sming-reqs-04.txt

["Joel M. Halpern" <joel@longsys.com>]

The two requirements are written exactly the same way, and yet Juergen you 
interpret them very differently.  Any textual representation meetsw the 
requirement as you re-state 4.1.3.  If that were accurate, then any 
parseable representation would meet the requirements for 4.1.4.  What Jon 
is raising on 4.1.3 is that if (as the requirement says) we are going for 
"easy" readability, then we have to decide ~easy for whom~.  Programmers 
find reading languages they are familiar with easy.  Heck, I knew folks who 
thought RPG was "readable".   So either this is a vacuous requirement, or 
we need to be more specific about whom it is to be read by.  By many 
standards, current MIBs are quite readable.

Yours,
Joel M. Halpern

At 03:10 PM 8/16/01 +0200, Juergen Schoenwaelder wrote:
>Jon> 4.1.3 Human Readability.  This requirement is not specific. Which
>Jon> people do you mean? And for whome do you wish to solve a problem?
>Jon> I do not think this is a major problem that merits they type of
>Jon> change implied.
>
>4.1.3 only says that SMIng must be human readable. What is wrong with
>that? Note that the objectives document does not specify the syntax
>of the solution.
>
>Jon> 4.1.4. Machine Readability I think the motiviation for making
>Jon> easy to implement SMIng parsers is misplaced. As stated
>Jon> previously this does not seem to be a major issue.
>
>I am not going to debate whether this is a major or minor issue.
>But I do not understrand what is wrong with simplifying parser
>implementations in general. Especially since I know too many SMI
>parsers that are just broken.