Re: Status of the WG

>>>>> Wijnen, Bert (Bert) writes:

Bert> APPLICATION 4 is the Opaque datatype that we claim in RFC2578 to
Bert> be there only for backward compatibility (see sect 7.1.9).

Bert> I doubt that if we do this that many current implementations
Bert> know how to deal with it without software upgrades. So I do not
Bert> see that this has much advantages over defining new tags

The difference is whether an implementation throws an ASN1/BER parse
error or whether the data moves up potentially all the way to the
application where an unknown variable will be ignored or something in
between understand the new datatype. This makes a serious difference
and that is why the NMRG did choose to use opaque wrappers.

Note that we have beaten this horse (and similar horses) already so
many times that I wonder why we have to do it yet again...

Note also that doing SMIv2.1 will get us back into all these debates
which we were never able to end with rough concensus so even while
SMIv2.1 seems simple and easy to do, the reality will be quite
different.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder    <http://www.informatik.uni-osnabrueck.de/schoenw/>