Guidelines Document and Optional Groups

["Sharon Chisholm" <schishol@nortelnetworks.com>]

hi

In section 4.8 in the MIB Review guidelines, it is RECOMMENDED that optional
groups have a compliance statement where the description clause indicates
that the group is optional, with the rational that people might accidentally
leave groups off the list otherwise. Has this really been a problem
historically?

My concern with RECOMMENDING this design approach is that the problem it is
claiming to solve doesn't seem to justify the extra work for
	- the MIB editors
	- MIB police
	- the reader needing to read a lot more text to determine which are
the mandatory or 
            conditionally mandatory groups. (Personally I like to skim
documents on the first pass
	      and the RECOMMENDED approach is going to give me bad
information.)

Can we reduce this to a COULD in the next update of the guidelines?

Sharon Chisholm
Portfolio Integration
Nortel Networks
Ottawa, Canada