Since our Area Directors have a lot of experience
with character sets and applications, we asked them if they had
any suggestions and advice. Harald A. responded, and he did
strongly encourage us to define the character set. (See below.)
When we reviewed these suggestions and advice against the
original localization proposal (late June), there did not seem
to be any way to make it all work. Now it seems possible that
Tom Hastings' latest proposal would be a satisfactory compromise
that incorporates this advice and has minimal impact to the MIB.
So we have to ask everyone to think through the technical issues
and see if this is the case.
Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 23:04:32 +0200
From: Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no
To: Chris Wellens <chrisw@iwl.com>
Cc: Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>, Lloyd Young <lpyoung@lexmark.com>
Subject: Re: Need advice on last issue
It's a deep hole indeed, and you might have no choice but
to throw yourselves headfirst into it :-)
Today: Strings are US-ASCII only, mostly English.
More desirable: Strings are UTF-8, mostly readable locally.
Most desirable: Strings are UTF-8, inquirer can choose which
language he prefers, and be given a reasonable answer.
(If you revise the MIB in such a way as to allow any character
set without defining how to find out which, you lose - DON'T)
MLSF or something like it is necessary if you want to avoid
rabid revisions of SNMP like carrying language preferences
in the community string; I'm sure there are SNMPv3 people
willing to draw a knife on you if you suggest that :-)
Upshot: I think you can do OK with the middle road this round,
but probably nothing more. But DO define the charset!
Harald A
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