PMP Mail Archive: Re: PMP> Compile verion of latest MIB

Re: PMP> Compile verion of latest MIB

Ira McDonald (imcdonal@sdsp.mc.xerox.com)
Thu, 15 Jul 1999 11:51:33 -0400

Hi Harry,

I've been running the SMICng tool 'mstrip' to extract the straight ASN.1
and then checking for compiler warnings in Epilogue or SMICng for feedback
to Lloyd.

Of course, there isn't *really* an official text of RFC 1759 (since without
a couple of lines of hand-edits it won't compile under *any* MIB compiler
I know of, when extracted from 'rfc1759.txt').

Two ways to write a MIB - write the compilable MIB as freestanding
source and then document it; or write a word processing document which
happens to contain the (embedded) MIB source and hope not many compile
errors are introduced. My informal observation is that 10-20% of the
IETF 'standards track' MIBs do *not* compile clean until edited (although
this has improved a lot in the past several years, so we can expect
that Printer MIB v2 will also be held up to a higher standard by
the IESG, including following the 'Internet Standard' SMIv2:1999
defined in RFC 2578-2580 and not the older RFC 1442-1444 or
1902-1904 texts).

Cheers,
- Ira McDonald