The next WIMS conference call is Wednesday, 27 April at 12 noon EDT.
The subject is the Counter Spec and MIB last call comments, and the email
traffic relative to these comments. Comment summaries are:
ftp://ftp.pwg.org/pub/pwg/wims/wd/LastCallComments/CounterLastCallComments20
050420.pdf
Plus Ron's comment "The term "Black Images" should be "Monochrome Images'".
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With respect to Ira's suggestion that the Counter MIB be abandoned, I
appreciate both the technical "flaw" and the discouragement that would
prompt this. If it is agreed that there is no useful purpose for the counter
MIB, then I agree that it should be abandoned and indeed should not have
been started. I suspect that this is not the case however, and that the
counter MIB has and will continue to draw more interest than the counter
spec. The counter spec, in itself, has no use other than to provide a basis
for a mapping.
It must be remembered that the Counter spec was offered as a Half-way
measure when there was no industry support to generating a full MFP MIB
dealing with the various MFP services as well as devices, unit and subunits.
The counter spec includes no sense of the physical components of an MFD
other than a "managed entity". Rather it defines the services, the
categories of utilization (job, waste, maintenance etc), and the types of
countable items produced (images, impressions of various types). One could
argue that for any useful purpose, these elements must be associated with a
physical entity and therefore that the counter spec provides necessary
definitions of counter types, but not all of the definitions necessary for
mapping the counters to actual physical entities using either MIB or Schema
approaches. That is, the Counter spec does not define all possible counters,
just types of counters.
It would be out of scope for counter spec to go further into defining the
physical components of an MFD (or indeed, even to define an MFD). But a MIB
or Schema implementation must relate to physical objects. I see no reason
why the Counter MIB must rely upon the Counter spec for all definitions. It
would be reasonable for the MIB to import useful definitions from elsewhere,
not just the counter spec. To the extent that units, subunits etc are not
adequately defined in previous MIBs, the counter MIB could include such
definitions on its own.
Bill Wagner