The SMIng WG has been closed. The WG could not get to consensus on a new version of the SMI language and even today, some 2.5 years after being chartered, there seems to be no consensus and/or wide community support to drive to conclusion on a deliverable. - In 1999 and 2000, the IRTF NMRG did a lot of work on a possible SMIng (Structure of Management Information Next Generation). The research group developed a complete new SMI language spec and also had implementations. In addition there were tools to convert to/from SMIv2 and tools to convert to/from other languages like IDL etc. - In November 2000, the SMIng WG was chartered. The WG was specifically limted to NOT try and develop a grandiose mother of all information/data modeling languages. Instead it was chartered to enhance the SMIv2 and to try and cater for a data modeling language that would re-merge the SMI and SPPI back into one advanced data modeling language. The resulting Management Information Modules would be able to be used by multiuple protocols, specifically SNMP and COPS-PR. - The WG was chartered to consider the NMRG SMIng work as base to start from. A requirements document was the first deliverable, to try and make sure it would address the most pressing needs but also to limit it to doable and implementable requirements. - The WG was originally chartered to finish by March 2002. - The WG got bogged down (initially) by defining the requirements. It took the WG 8 months (a year before the RFC showed up) to deliver the RFC (3216) that describes them (renamed to "objectives" because people worried that "requirements" would be used to "force" various "requirements" into a possible solution, even if the actual solution would turn out to be un-implementable or impractical. In hindsight, I think these were serious signs of trouble in the WG.). - The WG did not show (even rough) consensus on using SMIng as the base to start from. So the WG then went into a "submission of proposals" and later "selection" process. I believe this did bring good discussions into the WG, but it took a long time before a consensus was formed. The consensus I believe was to "merge the SMI-DS and the SMIng proposals". - However, when trying to work from that consensus, the WG seemed to have tired of the work. Not enough volunteers could be found to actually write the "merged" document set and to drive it to conclusion. During that process, it turned out that various core contributors continued to have serious concerns about some of their original ideas/concerns not being considered/addressed. There was also a feeling (by some) that the compromise solution would not be coherent and that it would lack a clear design. - It all culminated to an "un-volunteering" at the 55th IETF in November 2002. Instead of various members volunteering to help finish the documents that were agreed to by the WG, one of the volunteers "un-volunteered" some of the documents he had earlier volunteered to work on. The WG was warned soon afterwards that some better consensus, energy and effort towards a good result was needed in order to continue its work. - We are now 2 years and 4 months after the WG started and we have seen no new initiatives in the WG for the last 4-5 months. What a shame that we have wasted more than two years without any results. The IETF NM community clearly has lost interest to try to get consensus and continue work based on such consensus. - If the NMRG wants to publish the original SMIng docs as experimental or informational RFCs, they should go ahead and do so, so that we at least keep some record of a specification and implementaion that once was available. Bert Wijnen co-AD for the IETF Operations and Management Area
