Re: Guidelines Document and Optional Groups

[Andy Bierman <abierman@cisco.com>]

At 07:20 AM 5/28/2003, Sharon Chisholm wrote:
>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?

I disagree.  This is not very much work:
  
     GROUP  fooGroup
     DESCRIPTION
         "Implementation of this group is optional."

It is useful to help track the total set of objects associated
with a MODULE-COMPLIANCE. It also helps track when a group
of objects was added to the MIB, since REVISION clauses tend
to leave out these details.


>Sharon Chisholm
>Portfolio Integration
>Nortel Networks
>Ottawa, Canada

Andy