I actually introduced the use of OBJECT-IDENTITY in the document (way back in 1998!). Personally, I find it useful to help document the MIB (or MIB module depending on your orientation :)). Any of the other methods for creating a branch in the tree do not necessarily get put into the "compiled" MIB database for future reference by tools.
Regards, /gww
PS: the rest of the comments I can't comment on since I have not edited the document for many years.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Juergen Schoenwaelder [mailto:j.schoenwaelder@iu-bremen.de]
> Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2004 03:41
> To: Wijnen, Bert (Bert)
> Cc: Mreview (E-mail)
> Subject: 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