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Re: Question on: draft-ietf-ipv6-rfc2013-update-04.txt

On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 01:13:29PM -0400, David B Harrington wrote:
 
> Having worked on management applications, I do have a strong opinion
> on this. I believe we should provide a machine-readable object showing
> that the object is deprecated/obsolete.
> 
> If we do this, then manager applications can import the object and its
> new status, and warn the operator doing the import that the object is
> now obsolete or deprecated and that they should check to see if there
> is a better object to monitor.

Yeah, but those who do not import the updated specification will
nevertheless continue using the old outdated objects. There is IMHO
no way to fix this problem and it is more general than just MIB
modules.

There are still people out there asking question about SNMPv2p. We
all know this is historic and obsolete. Still, people read books or
other outdated sources of information and get confused. Even if we
would have incorporated the SNMPv2p specifications into the SNMPv3
documents marking each sentence as outdated, the problem would 
persist.

The only solution to this problem is education and to publish an 
easily accessible list of the current MIB modules (and which ones
are obsolete). The Simple Times has been a good source for this kind
of information, but due to lack of contributions, it is currently in 
a hibernation mode. Anyway, even with the Simple Times in place, people 
still ask about SNMPv2p stuff in several places...

The only other option I see is that we actually get the act together
to setup a repository for all the IETF MIB modules which is actively
maintained. When a MIB module is published which makes another module
historic, the document could just request that all the definitions
contained in that module are changed to obsolete, which is carried
out in the repository. This would be light-weight and perhaps generally
useful once a well maintained repository does exist. But even then,
some will ignore it and use outdated information - there is just no
way to fix this.
 
/js

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