Re: thoughts on documentation reuse.

[Juergen Schoenwaelder <schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>]

>>>>> Wes Hardaker writes:

Juergen> If I see a data type in a program and I need to know more
Juergen> about it, I have to go to the place where it is defined to
Juergen> see the details.  This is really not that hard to do.

Wes> The discussion in question centers around a notion that people
Wes> aren't doing that.

I agree that modular systems require people to do more lookups. How
people do these lookups is IMHO something outside the scope of a
language definition. If you prefer to print MIBs with all IMPORTS
resolved into one big set of definitions - no problem. It would be
relatively easy to hack smidump so that it produces output which
incorporates all imported definitions and thus works more or less like
a C preprocessor (although I do not know how to deal with things like
ifIndex - incorporate the whole ifTable??).

I personally doubt this is extremely useful (as much as I usually
dislike reading C preprocessor output). But that is probably more
personal taste and working style. I also doubt that it will work to
provide little summaries that are automatically merged without
generating some confusing output in same cases, especially if MIB
authors tend to not read the expanded version of their documents.

I am not sure how big this problem really is and whether it really
requires a solution in the language specification. I have heard people
complaint that it is hard to obtain complete MIB definitions from some
vendors and nasty to extract MIBs from RFCs. I never heard someone
complain that looking up and imported definition was too complex once
the MIB module was available.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder    <http://www.informatik.uni-osnabrueck.de/schoenw/>