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

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

The only reason I listed examples of syntaxes people have considered 
readable was to illustrate how very subjective it is.  Personally, even as 
an objective I can not figure out how I would use "human readability of the 
ascii form of the MIB" as a measure to compare two proposals.  In contrast, 
there has been a request from the operators that could be paraphrased as 
"the bits on the wire should be human readable ascii".  However, meeting 
such a request would clearly be outside of our remit.

Having said all that, if this is the worst problem in our objectives 
document, it is probably ready to be "done".
At the same time, given how loose it is, largely serving to capture a 
version of some thinking at a moment in time, I am not at all clear what 
purpose is served for the working group in RFC publication.  For our 
working purposes we can keep it alive as an I-D and use it exactly as much 
as if it were an RFC.  Given the content, I would hate to imagine someone 3 
years hence trying to match what we did (which had better be done by then) 
with such a document.  It is almost certain to be a mis-match.
I presume that the charter calls for publishing the document as an 
RFC.  But, given where we have gone with the document I have trouble 
understanding the purpose of an "Initial Objectives Before Tradeoffs of the 
SMIng working group" RFC.  I realize that in the original (circa 1969) RFC 
series it would have been very appropriate to publish this.  But now?

Yours,
Joel

At 05:56 PM 8/21/01 -0700, Durham, David wrote:
>Joel, who do you the think the reader will be? I'm interested in your
>opinion of who constitutes the majority of MIB readers. Is it enough to
>state it simply as readable to the majority of MIB readers?
>
>Other than a bit of scoping this requirement to a particular audience, would
>you accept readability as an objective?
>
>BTW, while it makes sense that the objectives should scope such statements,
>they are not to describe the solution. So all this discussion of what syntax
>easier or harder to read is a bit premature.
>
>-Dave
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Joel M. Halpern [mailto:joel@longsys.com]
> > Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2001 6:49 AM
> > To: sming@ops.ietf.org
> > Subject: Re: WG Last Call draft-ietf-sming-reqs-04.txt
> >
> >
> > 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.
> >
> >
> >