At 9:45 AM -0500 1/10/06, Brian Rosen wrote:
Do you have any idea how painful it is to build any kind of product that has good management simply because there is no library of MIBs, with references to documents? There isn't even a LIST of IETF MIBs. You can't figure out if a document has a MIB unless you actually look at the text (although many have a big hint in the title of the document). So yes, I believe better MIB tools would lead to better products, although it would be hard to prove it.
Why does this need to be done in the RFCs or Internet Drafts themselves? Why, for example, can't a human with a bit of training extract all the MIBs from the current RFCs and put them into a repository that is machine-accessible? Doing so would probably take less time than writing the tool to make human-readable RFCs also machine-readable.
As for Internet Drafts (if we really want people implementing from Internet Drafts), it is trivial to create a convention that says "if you want the MIB in your draft to be machine-readable, copy the MIB to a public web server and, in the draft, put on a line by itself: THE-MIB-IS-AT <url>". No changes are needed to any input or output tools, yet the problem of finding MIBs is solved.
I would like to enable automated testing of ABNF. I'd like to be able to cross check the ABNF from one document against its normative references to see what changes or conflicts. I'd like to be able to generate a complete list of SIP error messages a UA may be expected to encounter. I'd like to see a lot more hyperlinking of things. All of these are much easier with meta-data.
Sure. If any of those features came free or very cheap, that would be great. None of them do, particularly when you factor in the design-by-entire-IETF-mailing-list work factor. Instead, a bit of human interaction is much less expensive.
--Paul Hoffman, Director --VPN Consortium _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf