Re: Status of the WG

At 12:24 PM 2/14/2003 -0800, Wes Hardaker wrote:
>>>>>> On Thu, 13 Feb 2003 13:06:23 -0800, Andy Bierman <[email protected]> said:
>
>Andy> The cost/benefit ratio for SMIv2.1 seems worthwhile.  The
>Andy> need for HC data types has been known since (at least) 1992.
>Andy> Mandatory maintenance of SMIv2 is something that should already
>Andy> be done, so better late than never.
>
>Regardless of whether or not SMIv3 goes forward, the effort to create
>a SMIv2.1 would be well worth it.  I don't think it's a huge amount of
>work to fix the known problems and thus shouldn't even detract
>potential development of SMIv3 in the first place.

It's a small amount of work with a small amount of benefit.
What is being proposed here?
  - Unsigned64
    This is needed for writable 64-bit unsigned integers 
    (CounterBasedGauge64 works fine for read-only). So far,
    there is one MIB on the standards track that has been affected
    by the lack of Unsigned64 (HC-ALARM-MIB)
  - Integer64
    I'm not even sure this is needed.  Has any MIB been written that
    needs large negative numbers?
  - SMI clarifications
    This makes the standards writers feel better but it has no
    value to anyone else.

This doesn't seem like much of an improvement to me.  The deployment
costs are low, but so are the benefits.


>-- 
>Wes Hardaker
>Network Associates Laboratories 

Andy