RE: Generic TC Module

["Wijnen, Bert (Bert)" <bwijnen@lucent.com>]

W.r.t.

> We have this topic on the table every say two years. While I favoured
> the IANA solution some time ago, I am not really sure this is a
> solution. In fact, generic TCs need wide review and thus they should
> go the normal path. The only thing that is really special here is that
> TC collections are just TC _collections_ and the standard status
> really is a property of individual TC definitions and not the whole
> collection. Since we can only progress documents and we only have
> normative references to documents, collections really do not work
> well. In fact, the STATUS clause can also be seen as some way to work
> around this, leading to things like Standard obsolete definitions.  So
> to fix this, one would either have extremely narrow and focussed
> collections that have a reasonable change to be complete at some point
> in time so that they can progress or one would need documents where
> different parts have different standards status. The later one would a
> rather significant chance from existing practice and thus imply a
> change of many mindsets, something less likely to be successful. So
> from that perspective, I believe the only option is to start very
> narrow TC collections. To some extend, this is what the
> INET-ADDRESS-MIB did.
> 

Splitting them in smaller more related stes is fine by me too.

> Now, getting back to things like Unsigned8TC, I am not even convinced
> there is much value in having a standardized definition for these
> things since it is a) trivial to create them if you need them and b)
> there is not much implementations can take advange of by having a
> general TC definition since these TCs do not seem to have a special
> semantics which code generators can not already explore today.
> 

The problem I see is that if someone defines it as a TC in their
MIB module, then others may import them and create unwanted and
unlogical dependencies.

In the case of the isis MIB, I would then advise to name them
IsisUnsigned8TC and the-like.

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