RE: Future directions

Hi Juergen,

Open availability is a concern. IEEE 802.1 has agreed that the mib
modules should be published as text that is freely available. The
details aren't completely worked out yet (i.e. I haven't seen it
actually put into play yet).

I believe the plan is to publish the mib portion in ascii text and make
it readily available. The standard of which it is part would still be a
PDF that, under the existing "Get IEEE802" program, would be freely
available six months after standardization/publication. See
http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/ for more information.

The plan is pretty consistent with the existing environment, where the
IEEE creates and publishes a standard under IEEE publishing/availability
rules, and then the IETF Bridgemib WG writes and publishes a MIB module
to manage that technology, following IETF publishing/availability rules.

The one major difference is that IEEE 802.1 will not make the
specifications of the technology or mibs openly available for **public**
review during development, which is the IEEE way; the mib documents
would typically not be freely and publicly available until six months
after they were approved by the IEEE. However, 802.1 is willing to allow
IETF WGs controlled access (via WG chairs and MIB Doctors) to the mibs
and the technology specification during development for purpose of
review. To be clear, I believe the agreement is that an approved person,
such as a WG chair, will be given password access to the IEEE document
and can post it to an IETF WG public mailing list for review, but cannot
divulge the password; this is consistent with the way the bridgemib and
hubmib WGs have been working with IEEE. There are obviously some gaping
holes in the approach, but we're trying to allow two very different
publication/availability systems to work together.

So I believe the IEEE will "provide simple open and stable access to the
MIBs they produce." It may be desirable to keep the bridgemib WG alive,
but dormant, to allow a forum for IETF review of 802.1 mib modules.

dbh

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] 
> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Juergen Schoenwaelder
> Sent: Wednesday, March 31, 2004 4:49 PM
> To: Harrington, David
> Cc: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [Bridge-mib] Future directions
> 
> On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 03:20:46PM -0500, Harrington, David wrote:
>  
> > 4) Should they also be published as RFCs? 
> 
> It is important for me that the specifications and the MIB 
> modules are 
> easily accessible. RFCs have proven to be really great in this aspect.
> So from my view, it really boils down to the question whether IEEE is
> able to provide simple open and stable acess to the MIBs they produce.
> 
> /js
> 
> -- 
> Juergen Schoenwaelder		    International University Bremen
> <http://www.eecs.iu-bremen.de/>	    P.O. Box 750 561, 
> 28725 Bremen, Germany
> 
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