Re: Power Ethernet MIB Last Call - Late Comments

On Thu, 16 Jan 2003, David Law wrote:
> As Dan mentions below I'm concerned that there may be some
> changes that are about to occur in the IEEE P802.3af DTE
> Power via MDI Draft that may impact the Power Ethernet MIB.
> [ .... ] these changes may [ ... ] impact the Power Ethernet
> MIB in a couple of ways.  Firstly, that the Power Ethernet
> MIB references states in the PSE State Diagram that may be
> removed of whose behavior may be changed in a way that will
> now longer provided the desired behavior in the Power Ethernet
> MIB.  Secondly, changes to the register bits in the Clause 22
> registers may result in implementations no longer providing the
> hardware support for the Power Ethernet MIB, a undesirable
> situation in my opinion.

That's putting it mildly.  It would be intolerable if the
Power Ethernet MIB were not aligned with the behaviour or
hardware resources of standards-conforming devices.

> Now while it may be possible to list the individual
> updates required to the current Power Ethernet MIB
> draft to align to the comments resolved so far, it is
> entirely possible that additional changes could occur
> at the next comment resolution meeting.
> 
> Since I believe it is in the interest of the users of our
> respective documents to assure that our two document align, and
> alignment between similar documents in the past is something we
> have successfully achieved, it would be great if we could assure
> that happens again in this case despite any change that may
> occur to the IEEE P802.3af draft in the next couple of weeks.

I agree.  I think that the WG should wait until the IEEE P802.3af
draft is considered to be stable, and then update the Power
Ethernet MIB to align with it before submitting the document to
the the IESG for consideration as a Proposed Standard.

That's not to say that all work on the Power Ethernet MIB should
necessarily stop.  There are a number of MIB doctor and "ID nit"
type things that need to be addressed, as I noted in previous
comments.  If the authors want to spin an updated draft to
address those issues, I'll be happy to give it another review,
and then to do it again when the final technical changes from
the stable IEEE draft are rolled in.  A certain amount of churn
is just part of the process.

Mike