I'm working on windows so I would probably use copy :-)
Anyway, I agree that all the information should be in some kind of formal construct, but: 1. The SMI constructs do not answer all needs. There is no good/easy way to explain a dependency between two or more objects. 2. Descriptions which contain all the information might get very big, especially where enums are concerned, which makes harder their reading and understanding. When I'm (as a sysadmin) need to know what does the number 4 means for StorageType (RFC2579) it is much faster to learn it from the comment then from the description. What is worse is that there is no automatic way to associate an enum with its explenation contained at the description. 3. In practice comments apear in many MIBs, even some of the standard ones has some non trivial comments. The fact that current MIB browsers do not know how to handle comments, does not mean that the end user will not benefit from reading them.
The way I see libsmi, it is a generic tool to compile MIB files to other formats/langauges, therefor I don't see the point of limiting the generated format to "formats which do not contain comment information".
Have fun, Mark.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Frank Strauss" strauss@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de To: "Mark Kaplun" markk5@bezeqint.net Cc: libsmi@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de Sent: Saturday, May 18, 2002 7:03 PM Subject: Re: [libsmi] preserving comments
Hi!
Mark> My understanding is that in the current implementation Mark> comments are not being preserved at any data structure in Mark> libsmi.
Right. Comments are filtered out by the flex scanner.
Mark> If I'm right, I would like to suggest that a code will be Mark> added to do this. The advantages of preserving comments are Mark> that utilities like dumpsmi will be able to regenerate the Mark> exact contents of the original MIB module, and that there are Mark> some places, like enum values definition, were it is more Mark> convinient to use a comment near the definition.
I disagree. Comments are just comments. All essential information of a MIB has to be placed in formal constructs, i.e. DESCRIPTION and REFERENCES clauses. Otherwise this information is not available, e.g. in MIB browsers, smiquery, or other tools.
In case you are really looking for a tool that regenerates the exact contens of a MIB file, try `cp'. ;-)
-frank
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