Hi Harry and Lloyd,
Yes we are suspicious of problems. In the interests of expediency,
nineteen (19) months ago the PMP co-chairs abandoned efforts to
clarify the character set of EVERY string object in the Printer
MIB.
Since then, two things of relevance from my point of view happened
1) RFC 2277 (IETF Policy on Character Sets and Languages)
came into force
2) EVERY single MIB published on the IETF 'standards track' in
calendar 1998 uses ONLY UTF-8 (multibyte Unicode) strings,
without recourse to alternate character sets (which is a
backwards compatible upgrade from old US-ASCII 'DisplayString'
objects).
In addition, I joined the Globalisation Engineering Operations
group in the Xerox Architecture Centre and have a charter to
worry about exactly these issues full-time. No Xerox private
MIB module has EVER has any ambiguity about the character set
of ANY string object. And no new IETF 'standards track'
MIB has any ambiguity (even the SMIv2 conversion of the old
Host Resources MIB, RFC 1514, states that its local type
'InternationalDisplayString' is UTF-8).
Also, the convoluted syntax of the new channel type object
and the service person and current operator are non-portable,
unsafe, and bad design.
Also, there are no DEFVAL clauses on the objects in Printer
MIB v2, although they are present on virtually every IETF
'standards track' MIB published in the last two years.
That's not an exhaustive list of my objections, but it
hits the highlights.
Cheers,
- Ira McDonald (outside consultant at Xerox)
Xerox Architecture Centre, Globalisation Consulting Architect