Re: coex draft last call -- review of Section 2

On Tue, 7 Jan 2003, C. M. Heard wrote:

> - The second issue is with regard to the last paragraph of Section 2.3:
>
>    In order to ease coexistence, object groups defined in an SMIv1
>    compliant MIB module may be referenced by the INCLUDES clause of an
>    invocation of the AGENT-CAPABILITIES macro:  upon encountering a
>    reference to an OBJECT IDENTIFIER subtree defined in an SMIv1 MIB
>    module, all leaf objects which are subordinate to the subtree and
>    have a STATUS clause value of mandatory are deemed to be INCLUDEd.
>    (Note that this method is ambiguous when different revisions of an
>    SMIv1 MIB have different sets of mandatory objects under the same
>    subtree; in such cases, the only solution is to rewrite the MIB using
>    the SMIv2 in order to define the object groups unambiguously.)
>
> I know that this has been around since RFC 1908 (that seems to be
> where it was introduced), but I wonder if the popular MIB compilers
> actually support it (Dave, Juergen, Frank, please speak up).  I've
> not checked SMICng but my poking around with smilint-0.4.1 suggests
> that support there is partial at best (actual membership in imported
> "groups" doesn't seem to be checked).  If this is not actually
> supported in implementations I would recommend that it be removed
> from the spec, since it's not mentioned in RFC 2580 and so is not
> guaranteed to be supported by an SMIv2-compliant MIB compiler.

I can tell you that Muonics' MIB Smithy supports and checks it, and that I
added such capabilities to IWL's SilverCreek and their extended version of
the mosy compiler while I was contracted to add AGENT-CAPABILITIES support
to their product.  So there are at least two implementations (while I
wrote both, the code bases are entirely different/unrelated).

--
Michael Kirkham
www.muonics.com