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Re: use of OBJECT-IDENTITY



On Wed, Mar 17, 2004 at 11:55:07PM +0100, Wijnen, Bert (Bert) wrote:
 
> > This usage of the OBJECT-IDENTITY macro also raises 
> > interesting questions what the status clause really means for the
> > things registered on that branch...
> > 
> It seems that the branch should always stay current and that stuff
> underneed it may get deprecated or obsoleted. Would that not work?

Sure, you can come up with a definition to make it work. But I am
wondering what the benefit of doing this really is. None of the IETF
MIBs used OBJECT-IDENTITY macros like this before and I can not 
remember that this ever was a problem.

I have observed that some people (especially new people) pay way too 
much attention to the structure of the OID tree (which mainly is just 
there to give us unique names) while the indexing structure and the 
relationships between tables are much more important things to worry 
about. And some of those who believe that the OID tree is really 
important then start to use OBJECT-IDENTITY macros to build the tree.

[I guess this common mis-understanding comes from the many tools out 
 there which highlight the OID tree rather than focussing the users
 attention on the tables and their relationships.]

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder		    International University Bremen
<http://www.eecs.iu-bremen.de/>	    P.O. Box 750 561, 28725 Bremen, Germany