Re: draft-ops-endpoint-mib-06.txt example syntax?

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

>>>>> Keith McCloghrie writes:

Keith> It is common practice that not-accessible objects are never put
Keith> into an OBJECT-GROUP.  However, that's not what section 3.1
Keith> actually says:

[...]

Well, section 3.1 also says:

   The OBJECTS clause, which must be present, is used to specify each
   object contained in the conformance group.  Each of the specified
   objects must be defined in the same information module as the
   OBJECT-GROUP macro appears, and must have a MAX-ACCESS clause value
   of "accessible-for-notify", "read-only", "read-write", or "read-
   create".

The last sentence is IMHO very clear that putting a not-accessible
object into an OBJECTS clause is illegal. I think that this sentence
is problematic.

Keith> Note that the rationale behind not putting not-accessible
Keith> objects in an OBJECT-GROUP is that you cannot Get/Set a
Keith> not-accessible object, and so compliance cannot require access
Keith> to it, nor can compliance be verified, at least not directly.
Keith> (It could be argued that an not-accessible object can be
Keith> accessed/verified indirectly through the columnar objects in
Keith> the table for which it is an INDEX, but those columnar objects
Keith> need to be in an OBJECT-GROUP anyway, and so indirect
Keith> accessing/verifying is redundant.)

You can of course write not-accessible INDEX objects during row
creation and it makes IMHO sense to specify which subset of the
enumerated values of an INDEX object must be supported in order to be
compliant. You cannot express that formally right now if I read RFC
2580 correctly. It does not help much that you can express refinements
for other columnar objects. Do you agree?

If so, can we also agree that the statement `must have a MAX-ACCESS
clause value of "accessible-for-notify", "read-only", "read-write", or
"read-create"' is the root of the problem?

In other words: It is OK to require that all object with MAX-ACCESS >
not-accessible are contained in at least one object group. But it is
problematic to forbid membership for an object with MAX-ACCESS <
accessible-for-notify.

/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/>