PMP> RE: Print MIB 09

[McDonald, Ira]

Hi Juergen,

This is a tough question.  For six years now every Xerox product has
shipped with 'prtAlertIndex' at 'read-only' to preserve the content
of the notification.  I have seen this done at several other printer
vendors.  To date, there is no identified shipping implementation
that leaves 'prtAlertIndex' at 'not-accessible' (that was only one
of several compile errors in the RFC 1759 text - I've never seen a
compiler that would accept RFC 1759 unmodified, but I suppose it's
possible).

Our WG concensus to change the published version to 'read-only' is
in order to align with all known shipping implementations (who all
did it by hand-edit themselves).

Cheers,
- Ira McDonald, consulting architect at Xerox
  High North

-----Original Message-----
From: Juergen Schoenwaelder [mailto:schoenw at ibr.cs.tu-bs.de]
Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2001 2:23 AM
To: Ron.Bergman at Hitachi-hkis.com
Cc: dbh at enterasys.com; bwijnen at lucent.com; Ron.Bergman at Hitachi-hkis.com;
harryl at us.ibm.com; rcasterline at crt.xerox.com; pmp at pwg.org;
paf at cisco.com; ned.freed at mrochek.com; IMcDonald at crt.xerox.com
Subject: Re: Print MIB 09



>>>>> Bergman, Ron writes:

Ron> The WG has already discussed the addition of text to explain why
Ron> prtAlertIndex is broken.  In fact is is presently being drafted.
Ron> We are still not sure if this object must be "not-accessible" or
Ron> can we change to "read-only".  Since with many compilers the MIB
Ron> must be modified to "read-only", the WG prefers to change the
Ron> MAX-ACCESS clause.  The addition of a new group and conformance
Ron> statements, in this case, is agreed.

There are existing fielded implementations that implement
prtAlertIndex not-accessible. So what is the point in making it
read-only just to kind of fix the notification? If it is true that
people had problems to implement the notification because
prtAlertIndex is not-accessible, then this would be a data point to
actually fix the notification by providing a new one that does it
right.

Changing prtAlertIndex from not-accessible to read-only to fix the
notification kind is IMHO heading in the wrong direction.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder      Technical University Braunschweig
<schoenw at ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>  Dept. Operating Systems & Computer Networks
Phone: +49 531 391 3289    Muehlenpfordtstr. 23, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany
Fax:   +49 531 391 5936    <http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/~schoenw/>