Disappointment with guidelines doc (was: Re: consensus call sect4.4)

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

On Wed, 5 Feb 2003, David T. Perkins wrote:
> Please note that I do respect the tremendous amount of effort
> that has been put into the guidelines documents by Mike Heard.
> And I'm sorry that I do not have the time to further support his
> effort with detailed comments on the consequences (including
> interactions) with the suggestions. I've been quite disappointed
> with some examples that have been used for clarifications.

I'm not sure which examples in the document you are disappointed
with, but I must confess that I am disappointed with most of
Section 4.  Midway through the effort it started to become clear
that much of the work in there was a re-hash of stuff in the SMIv2
documents, and that the effort would probably be better spent in
doing a maintenance revision of those documents.

I think that the most valuable parts of the guidelines document are
in Section 3 and the "non-technical" parts of Section 4 (i.e., the
stuff that tells folks what we expect in ORGANIZATION, CONTACT-INFO,
and REVISION clauses).  Having all this gathered into one place is
useful, and if we can get the document authors just to do that stuff
it will be a BIG win for MIB Doctors and the ADs because we can then
concentrate on the technical aspects.  The technical stuff about
MIBs, however, SHOULD be covered adequately by the SMIv2 docs
themselves without need of more guidelines.  Note the echo here of
some of Keith's comments.

> That is, I believe that an SMI v2.1 is needed that incorporates
> Mikes work and adds support that addresses current SMI limitations.

Back in August the consensus (in the discussion triggered by the
controversy over writable versions of CounterBasedGauge64) was
that all the new features should be deferred to SMIng.  I've been
monitoring that list by checking the archives regularly, and it
seems to have been silent for quite a while.

//cmh