RE: Status of the WG

At 03:55 AM 2/15/2003 -0500, Bob Natale wrote:
>At 2/13/2003:04:06 PM, Andy Bierman wrote:
>
>Hi Andy,
>
>>...
>>The cost/benefit ratio for SMIv2.1 seems worthwhile.  The
>>need for HC data types has been known since (at least) 1992.
>>Mandatory maintenance of SMIv2 is something that should already
>>be done, so better late than never.
>
>I agree with that...but I am having a hard type
>aligning your statement above with your subsequent
>comments on this thread.  Can you please clarify
>your position...or do you think I just misinterpreted
>the above quote (to mean that you consider some set
>of incremental improvements to SMIv2 to be "worthwhile"
>from a cost/benefit perspective)?

I made the statement above without thinking through the
actual benefits that HC data types will bring.  I don't
know if there is some set of incremental changes that
will be worthwhile.  I think that introducing a third
SMI variant will have a minimum cost which will be 
roughly the same no matter what the feature set of the
new variant. We also have to introduce a new protocol
variant, since new data types need to be encoded with
new ASN.1 tags.

It is a subjective matter as to how important the incremental
features are, based on your need for them, the number of
applications you have that need to change, the number of
agents you have that need to change, the cost of the
workarounds if the new features are not added (e.g., 
2 Unsigned32 objects instead of 1 Unsigned64), the cost
of 'double MIB definitions' during a transition period
for the new data types, etc.

There are lots of factors to consider, which I should of
done before making the comment above.


>Thanks,
>
>BobN

Andy