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Re: Examples of ASN.1 for SMIng.txt
>>>>> John Larmouth writes:
John> Of course you are right. This was the argument put forward by
John> GDMO in the mid 1980s. There is always a balance:
John> a) Do something that is your own thing, and get a small set of
John> tools to support that as a niche market; or
John> b) Latch onto a more general notation with a wider set of
John> tools that can meet most of your needs.
If we were to choose option b), then the base language to use would be
XML and ASN.1 because ASN.1 tool vendors are what I call a niche
market compared to the market of XML tools.
John> The balance may depend on whether you are interested in
John> professional quality tools or simply want public domain
John> offerings.
My experience with so called "professional quality tools" over many
years is that quite a few of them have much lesser quality than
"public domain offerings". In other words, I completely disagree with
your model of the open source movement. I have been involved in the
development of freely available network management tools that are used
in "professional quality" products and which are used for quality
assurance and regression testing by major device vendors.
John> Those alternatives are also a difficult balance!
I understand that people having investment in ASN.1 want to sell ASN.1
(and their tools).
I understand that a user such as Andy does not care as long as he can
get good tools (which includes not only the parser frontends but also
code generating backends I guess).
I understand that most SMIv1/SMIv2 parsers are not ASN.1 toolkit based
and implementors of these parsers are not likely to change to an ASN.1
toolkit implementation just to support SMIng since SMIv1/SMIv2 is not
going to go away any time soon.
/js
--
Juergen Schoenwaelder Technical University Braunschweig
<schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de> Dept. Operating Systems & Computer Networks
Phone: +49 531 391 3289 Muehlenpfordtstr. 23, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany
Fax: +49 531 391 5936 <http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/~schoenw/>