RE: Updating the MIB boilerplate

["C. M. Heard" <heard@pobox.com>]

On Mon, 4 Nov 2002, Wijnen, Bert (Bert) wrote:

> I have also looked at this, and it seems that one line
> sentence to point to Section 7 of rfc2570bis would do the
> job (or so I think). As far as I am concerned, that can
> even be an informative reference.
> 
> I would think that in many cases we will continue to need
> normative references to RFC2578/2579/2580 cause people
> almost always import stuff from those 3 documents.
> 
> Any differing opinions?

I think that a normative reference to RFC2578 belongs in
every IETF document that contains an SMIv2 MIB module,
because that document defines aspects of SMIv2 upon which
all modules depend whether they import anything from
SNMPv2-SMI or not.  I suppose that you might be able to
avoid a reference to 2579 in a MIB module that makes no
use of TCs, and you might be able to avoid a reference to
2580 for a MIB module that has nothing but TCs, but those 
would be exceptional cases.

In any case, I thought that all of the normative/informative
references for MIB modules were already agreed upon, and
that the only change when the new documents are published
would be to put in the RFC numbers of the replacement
documents.  Are you proposing to go back on that?  I don't
mind, I proposed to make RFC2578/2579/2580 normative and
everything else informative, but other people disagreed.

Mike