usage of "macro invocation" terminology in the MIB review guidelinesdocument

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

Colleagues,

In several places the draft "Guidelines for MIB Authors and Reviewers"
document that I posted last month uses "macro invocation" terminology
that was more-or-less copied from RFC 2578, RFC 2579, and RFC 2580.
The phrases where this usage appears are as follows:

"invocation of the MODULE-IDENTITY macro"
"MODULE-IDENTITY invocation"
"MODULE-COMPLIANCE macro invocation"
"AGENT-CAPABILITIES macro invocation"

Dave Perkins, in an off-line e-mail exchange, has suggested that this
terminology is unhelpful and should be avoided.  Some replacements
that have been kicked around are:

"invocation of the MODULE-IDENTITY construct"
"MODULE-IDENTITY specification"
"MODULE-COMPLIANCE definition"
"AGENT-CAPABILITIES definition"

Since the latter two are called compliance statements and capabilities
statements respectively, another thought would be to use instead:

"MODULE-COMPLIANCE statement"
"AGENT-CAPABILITIES statement"

I think these all sound just fine and don't much care one way or another
what terminology is used in the document.  What I'd like to get is a
sense from the group what would be most helpful to the document's
intended audience.  Note that the document already deviates from the
usage in the RFCs by using the term "MIB module" in place of "information
module" in accordance with popular usage, as pointed out in Section 2.

Any thoughts?

//cmh

P.S.  One thing that I haven't mentioned is the first sentence in
Section 4.2, which says:

   RFC 2578, Sections 3.1, 7.1.1, and 7.1.4, and RFC 2579, Section 3
   recommend that descriptors associated with macro invocations and
   labels associated with enumerated INTEGER and BITS values be no
   longer than 32 characters, but require that they be no longer than 64
   characters.

Since I'm more or less quoting the RFCs, I'm inclined to leave this
as is, irrespective of what is done for the other stuff.  But I can
easily be persuaded otherwise.