RE: Issue with MIB compilation requirement in "AD Review of I-Ds" (http://www.ietf.org/ID-nits.html)

["Wijnen, Bert (Bert)" <bwijnen@lucent.com>]

Currently, when longer than 32 character names are used 
I tell authors that I will not mandate them to change.
So I basically leave it up to them.

I would be fine if smilint by default allows >32 (but <64) names

Thanks,
Bert 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: C. M. Heard [mailto:heard@pobox.com]
> Sent: vrijdag 13 december 2002 0:31
> To: mreview@ops.ietf.org
> Subject: Re: Issue with MIB compilation requirement in "AD Review of
> I-Ds" (http://www.ietf.org/ID-nits.html)
> 
> 
> [ cc list trimmed down ]
> 
> On Thu, 12 Dec 2002, Juergen Schoenwaelder wrote:
> > >>>>> C M Heard writes:
> > 
> > Mike> It would be better if we could get the mailer service to at
> > Mike> least omit the namelength-32 warnings, which IMHO are just
> > Mike> annoying noise.  Thus, it would be nice if the default assumed
> > Mike> by the mailer service could be "smilint -l 9 -s -i
> > Mike> namelength-32".
> > 
> > If there would be a document which says that the underlying 
> SMIv2 rule
> > is considered to be not important anymore, then I am happy to just
> > remove this warning from smilint. (I am myself annoyed by it so I
> > usually turn it off anyway. In fact, the -i option was 
> added some time
> > ago specifically to handle this case...)
> 
> There is something to this effect in Section 2.4 of the draft 
> mib author's
> & reviewer's guidelines.
> 
> > In other words, rather than spending time to write down how to tweak
> > specific tools to not carefully check what is written down in the
> > SMIv2 specs, I would prefer a sentence which says that there is
> > consensus that this rule serves no purpose and then tools will just
> > get changed.
> 
> I agree with you, and this is what I wrote:
> 
>    Restricting descriptors and labels to 32 characters often conflicts
>    with the recommendation that they be mnemonic and (for descriptors)
>    the requirement that they be unique (see RFC 2578, Section 
> 3.1).  The
>    SMIv2 recommendation to limit names to 32 characters SHOULD be set
>    aside when it comes in conflict with these considerations.
> 
> In all the cases in my experience where this issue has arisen the
> MIB authors have used long descriptors for exactly the right reasons
> (uniqueness and clarity), so I turn the namelength-32 check off as a
> matter of routine anymore.  If you think that stronger language would
> is warranted, that's OK with me (but it would be nice to get 
> an explicit
> proposal for new text).
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Mike
> 
>