RE: type-without-format

["Romascanu, Dan \(Dan\)" <dromasca@avaya.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Frank Strau? [mailto:strauss@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de] 
> Sent: Monday, May 30, 2005 6:56 PM
> To: Romascanu, Dan (Dan)
> Cc: Mreview (E-mail)
> Subject: Re: type-without-format
> 
> On 30.05.2005, at 17:12, Romascanu, Dan ((Dan)) wrote:
> 
> > Can somebody explain the following warning:
> > sip-mib-09.txt:120: [5] {type-without-format} warning: type 
> > `SipMethodIdentifier' has no format specification
> >
> > received when running smilint on the attached MIB modules: [...]
> 
> The concerned TEXTUAL-CONVENTION clause does not contain a 
> DISPLAY- HINT. In cases where the underlying base type would 
> allow to render values in different ways this could lead to 
> misunderstandings, e.g.  
> octal vs. decimal representation. It could be a good idea to 
> explicitly specify that values of this type should be 
> rendered as decimal values by adding a DISPLAY-HINT "d" (or 
> any other appropriate display hint).
> 
> BTW, libsmi uses terms like "type" and "format" instead of 
> TEXTUAL- CONVENTION and DISPLAY-HINT because its core is not 
> bound to SMI, so we chose more general terms (e.g. from most 
> programming languages), though less common if you are focused 
> on SMI MIBs.
> 

Thanks - makes sense.  The authors of the document under review may
argue that in the MIB modules that they authored the objects defined
using this TC are all not-accessible, but still this TC may be used
differently in other MIB modules in the future. 

Dan