Subject: Conformance group problem in draft-ietf-atommib-rfc2495bis-01.txt

From: "C. M. Heard" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2002 13:05:16 -0700 (PDT)

Orly,

I just ran an smidiff check on the DS1 MIB and the following messages
caught my eye:

DS1-MIB.my:2142 [2] member `dsx1LineMode' added to group `ds1NearEndConfigGroup'
DS1-MIB.my:2142 [2] member `dsx1LineBuildOut' added to group `ds1NearEndConfigGroup'

These changes are not legal (it is not allowed to add members to a
conformance group), and so will need to be fixed.

The reason why it is not allowed to add members to a conformance group
is because it silently changes the meaning of any compliance statement
that refers to it.  The affected compliance statements in this case are
ds1Compliance, ds1MibT1PriCompliance, and ds1MibE1PriCompliance.  What
one needs to do is to define a new conformance group and new compliance
statements, and to deprecate (but not change) the existing compliance
statements.  See Sections 7.1 and 7.2 of RFC 2580 for more details.
[I might note in passing that adding enumerations can cause problems
too; see issue #4 in http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/ietf/smi-errata/
We are OK in the present case because the objects for which enum
values have been added all have a MIN-ACCESS of read-only].

Mike