Subject: script mib issue # 18

From: Juergen Schoenwaelder <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2001 17:54:38 +0100

ISSUE 18:

The description of smRunError says:

      "This object contains a descriptive error message if the
       script terminates abnormally. An implementation must
       store a descriptive error message in this object if the
       script exits with the smRunExitCode `genericError'.

       The value of this object is the zero-length string as long
       as the smRunExitCode has the value `noError'"

The first paragraph is OK. The second one however looks like an
overspecification to me. Some runtime engines can have non-fatal
runtime errors. An example is a script which sometimes looses SNMP
responses, e.g. due to network overload problems. Many Tcl monitoring
scripts which are purely event-driven will handle this as a non-fatal
error situation and it would be nice to report the problem via the
smRunError object. However, the last paragraph in the description does
not allow me to do that.

PROPOSAL:

Remove the last paragraph altogether. (Note that this implies a change
in the SMX protocol as well in order to allow SMX runtime engines to
report runtime errors asynchronously. But this is just an addition and
not an incompatible change.)

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder      Technical University Braunschweig
<[email-masked]>  Dept. Operating Systems & Computer Networks
Phone: +49 531 391 3289    Bueltenweg 74/75, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany
Fax:   +49 531 391 5936    <URL:http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/~schoenw/>