Michele> However, my application is now failing due to changes
Michele> in behaviour between the two versions. I tend to call
Michele> this a bug, since the previous behaviour seems to be
Michele> correct, but perhaps there were good reasons for the
Michele> change.
Michele> Anyway, under 2.0.2, 'mib syntax system' returns
Michele> 'OBJECT IDENTIFIER'. Under 2.1.3, it returns ''. I
Michele> favor the former, as that is the syntax defined in the
Michele> mib.
Lets see how RFC 1213 defines system:
system OBJECT IDENTIFIER ::= { mib-2 1 }
This is a ASN.1 value assignement of type OBJECT IDENTIFIER. However,
the SYNTAX clause of an OBJECT-TYPE macro "defines the abstract data
structure corresponding to that object" (RFC 1902, section 7.1). So
these two things are very different - in fact, the assignement above
does not define a syntax at all. The description of the "mib syntax"
command in the mib(n) man page says that
The mib syntax command returns the ASN.1 syntax associ-
ated with a MIB node or an empty string if the node
identified by label has no associated ASN.1 syntax.
I think this is consistent. Returning the type of the value
assignement if the MIB node does not have an associated syntax is IMHO
a bug since it mixes up two different things. Does this convince?
Juergen
-- Juergen Schoenwaelder schoenw@cs.utwente.nl http://www.cs.utwente.nl/~schoenw Computer Science Department, University of Twente, (Fax: +31-53-489-3247) P.O. Box 217, NL-7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands. (Tel. +31-53-489-3678)