Re: Target times for MIB Doctor Review

["David T. Perkins" <dperkins@dsperkins.com>]

HI,

From my most recent reviews....
1) I believe that the work of Mike Heard and David Harrington
   should free MIB reviewers from spending time doing busy
   work. That is, RFC 4181 has to be required reading before
   a MIB I-D is started and re-read before submission to
   review. Also, the new XML templace for MIB documents
   by DBH should be required to be used.
2) I wrote up a long addition about what should be in the
   DESCRIPTION clauses for tables and rows. Due to timing,
   it didn't make it into RFC 4181. I'd sure like to see
   the addition reviewed and added to RFC 4181.
3) I believe that example "MIB walks" be provided to the
   MIB reviewer. This is very important to verify
   the values of some objects. Also, when there are complex
   inter-relationships between tables, the values can
   help show the relationships.
4) Both document authors (and editors) are busy people.
   In the MIBs that I reviewed, the documents were done
   before I was asked to review them. I had only a few
   free calendar days that I could review them. So the
   MIB modules sat until I could get to them. When I
   finished the first review, I heard nothing back
   until a few days before the end of the year holidays,
   and I had not allocated any days to review them,
   so they say until the second week in January.
   One of the MIB documents had potentially many
   problems, but I have no visability of the schedule
   that the document author is on in providing answers
   and updates. The point is that it appears to me
   that authoring and reviewing are processess where
   neither role has visability to the other, and thus
   only when a document or review comments is received
   does scheduling occur. Thus, there are many gaps.
5) Unless you are keeping up with a technology,
   then when you review a MIB module for the technology,
   you must spend some time coming up to speed
   on the technology. This can be a difficult
   because the technology is new and/or changing
   and thus there are no books. It would be quite
   helpful if a MIB reviewer could be provided
   with high level documents and access to a
   technical expert (which may not need be the
   document author) to get a quick tutorial
   and have questions answered.

What I've found most in reviews is
1) lack of "deep knowledge" needed to most appropriately
   write MIB modules. That is, the authors know what they
   want to do, but lack knowledge in how to express it with
   constructs in a MIB module.
2) misunderstandings of the limitations SMI that are the
   result of the limitations of the SNMP protocol
3) messed up modelling with complex tables


On Tue, 31 Jan 2006, Wijnen, Bert (Bert) wrote:
> I am here in an IESG retreat about improving IESG/IETF performance.
> 
> One of the things being discussed is that MIB doctor review (one of
> the situations where some ADs put the doc in "expert review" status
> as the substate in the I-D tracker) can take enourmously long.
> 
> The main reason is that it is often difficult to find a reviewer, and
> then the doc sort of by defaults ends up in my queue (which is too
> long already).
> 
> So the suggestion is that we would like to have a target of MIB
> Doctor review to be done within 30 days of the request.
> 
> I want to hear from you how to deal with that?
> If we cannot find a good solution, then the only alternative that
> I can see is that we will get MIB documents onto IETF Last Call
> and onto IESG without the normal MIB Doctor review, and so the
> OPS-NM AD (for now that is me) will only check for fatal errors.
> 
> The result might be that we end up with MIB documents in much worse
> shape than what we have seen over the last few years.
> 
> What do we think about this?
> 
> Bert
> 

Regards,
/david t. perkins