Re: draft minutes from the sming interim:

HI,


At 09:04 PM 6/28/2002 +0200, Frank Strauss wrote:

>David> With SMICng there are many compiler directives to control
>David> checking.  Because there is no standard way to specify
>David> directives, and there are no standard directives, users of
>David> SMICng must specify the checking directives on the command line
>David> (or environment variable) to SMICng, or create wrapper files
>David> containing directives which then include the MIB file. I don't
>David> want to modify a MIB file so that it cannot be used by another
>David> compiler. This means that the directives are at the module
>David> level. It would be much better to specify the directive around
>David> the particular construct in a MIB module. This helps the reader
>David> of a MIB module by "pointing out" usage that is questionable
>David> (maybe for backwards compatibility), or providing a hint for
>David> unusual usage.
>
>If you would like to have a parser supporting directives within MIB
>files, this can be achieved within comments, without breaking SMI
>compatibility. (I'm not saying this is an elegant approach. But IMHO
>blowing the language with preprocessor stuff isn't any better.)

Wrapping directives with comments is one way to go. However,
just saying that is insufficient because there may be clashes
between directives from different compiler vendors. That is
why this has to be standardized. (Also, a MIB writer may
"accidentally" include a directive in a comment, and thus,
the MIB module may run fine through most compilers, and then
blowup on the compiler that interprets the comment as a directive!

Regards,
/david t. perkins