Re: RMON document advancement

["C. M. Heard" <heard@pobox.com>]

On Fri, 16 Dec 2005, Andy Bierman wrote:
> [ ... ] nobody cares about a MIB advancing from Proposed to Draft.
> We did a bunch of work, only to cause harm to the standards
> community by attempting to deprecate objects actually in use!
> 
> I cc:ed MIB Doctors to see if I could rile anyone
> into defending the MIB Standards Advancement Process.
> IMO, the whole process should be suspended until the NEWTRK
> work is done.  (Which might be never ;-)

Andy, I agree with everything you have said.  And there's more: in
the AToM MIB working group, I think we caused harm to the standards
community by insisting that new objects should not be added to the
SONET-MIB, but rather put into a separate supplemental MIB module,
just to make it possible to advance the SONET-MIB to DS. There were
several attempts to get a supplemental MIB effort going, but in the
end none made it to completion, and a good deal of useful stuff
never made it into any MIB module.  Also (echoing of the ENTITY-MIB
experience) we actually considered deprecating all the Sonet VT
stuff because for a while we had only one vendor implementation; in
the end we got the required second report, but it was almost an
accident that we did so.  That experience convinced me that the Hub
MIB WG's de facto practice of adding objects to the EtherLike-MIB
and MAU-MIB as the IEEE standards change and recycling at proposed
is the right thing to do.

Mike