About the proposed new `mib' command.

Juergen Schoenwaelder (schoenw@gaertner.de)
Fri, 30 May 1997 13:35:47 +0200

Back in January, I proposed to rewrite the mib command. (See
http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/projects/nm/tkined/marchive-1997/0057.html
for details.)

I have implemented it and I learned that it was a stupid idea. The
problem is that creating Tcl handles for MIB nodes does not scale well
enough to deal with thousands of MIB nodes.

I am now reverting more or less back to the old syntax. However, I
will make some changes, that might affect some scripts. I will remove
all the -exact options and add a new command option which tests
whether an oid or label refers to a known MIB node. I will change the
"mib name" command to return fully qualified names in the format
<module>!<label>. This ensures that

string compare [mib oid [mib name $oid]] $oid

is always 0. (Otherwise you could have funny surprises.) I will also
generalize some commands to operate on type definitions. For example,
the format command will accept SNMP types, e.g.

mib format SNMPv2-TC!DisplayString "73:63:6f:74:74:79"

This is IMHO a much cleaner way to apply formatting rules. I am
planning to add some new command options that allow to retrieve the
elements returned by the `mib tc' command, e.g.

mib displayhint SNMPv2-TC!DisplayString

I am sending you this message just to keep you informed that the
syntax proposed in January has been dropped.
Juergen

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder     <schoenw@gaertner.de>     (Tel: +49-531-23873-0)
Gaertner Datensysteme, Hamburger Strasse 273a, 38114 Braunschweig, Germany

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