Re: OID Registration -- Rules versus BCP (fwd)

[Michael Kirkham <mikek@muonics.com>]

On Thu, 9 Jan 2003, C. M. Heard wrote:

> Correct.  RFC 2578 Section 7.10 makes this quite explicit.  In fact it
> seems to go further;  if I correctly interpret the following, it is not
> not just registration but any assignment that it banned:
>
> (3)  Otherwise, no other OBJECT IDENTIFIERs which are subordinate to the
>      object may be assigned.

This is my feeling as well, and how my tool is currently enforcing things
(anything subordinate to anything, except nothing below object-types
except for the row/column objects-types).  I've had some off-list
disagreement with DP on this issue.  [I was going to suggest he bring them
up but he just did while I was writing this message. :)]

> That seems reasonable to me.  I'd like to have warnings about such things.
> But it's also a good idea to also have a reliable way to turn the warning
> off.

Definitely.  [I can't say I support this yet, but that is because this
stage of development has been focused on MIB design and authoring rather
than instrumentation, where it's very useful to have as much information
as possible.  As soon as I finish tying up a couple of loose ends and
start branching (no pun intended) into other aspects, this is a pretty
high priority.]

> Not everyone appreciates such warnings, particularly for things that
> are not actually harmful, and sometimes one has to deal with existing MIB
> modules that don't conform to your (or my) concept of "well-organized".

Well, in this case the warnings that will be issued are compatibility
warnings.  These are a class of warnings issued by my company's
compiler/tool that indicate technical validity but are known to be points
of failure for some compilers.  It came to my attention that there are
some compilers that will fail the validity check in such situations as
those described (though indications are that they shouldn't, and it's not
my place or intent to point any fingers).  I do not know if these errors
can be disabled or turned into warnings in those tools, so my tool's
warnings are meant to alert the user that their MIB module may not
successfully compile with their customers' toolset(s) and they might want
to reconsider their design for maximum interoperability.

--
Michael Kirkham
www.muonics.com