RE: ifNumber and its ilk considered harmful

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

I don't think I know of cases where we disapproved
such a scalar. I do know that we (or some of us) may
have questioned the usefulness, or may have warned
mib developers about the impacts on agentX implementations
and such. It of course depends on the question:
  Is the counter potentially counting instances in
  different sub-systems or sub-agents.

I think it is hard to give a fixed rule for this.

Thanks,
Bert 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike MacFaden [mailto:mrm@riverstonenet.com]
> Sent: vrijdag 7 februari 2003 5:40
> To: mreview@ops.ietf.org
> Subject: ifNumber and its ilk considered harmful
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Forwarded message from Margaret Wasserman 
> <mrw@windriver.com> -----
> 
> >From: Margaret Wasserman <mrw@windriver.com>
> >Subject: Re: Please add back FIB counter to 2096 update
> >
> >Hi Mike,
> >
> >I hear conflicting things from various MIB experts about
> >whether or not the "number" variables are useful.
> >
> >They don't represent the number of objects within the
> >view, and they also are hard (maybe impossible?) to
> >implement on distributed systems such as AgentX.
> >
> >So, I thought there were sufficiently out-of-favor that
> >we shouldn't continue with them...
> >
> >Apparently you disagree, though?  Is this something that
> >the MIB experts could work out between themselves and
> >reach a consistent opinion regarding?
> >
> ----- End forwarded message -----
> 
> Comments?
> 
> Have any recent reviews disapproved of using scalars like ifNumber?
> 
> Regards,
> Mike
>