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After much hard work, the SMI for SNMP was revised and published as RFCs 2578, 2579, and 2580. The status of the documents have also been advanced, so that they are now FULL standards. Work has progressed on SMICng to fully align it the new SMI. And it is now released as a BETA. It is only designated as a BETA because it has not yet been fully tested on all platforms. This was partially motivated by the update of the SMI to support 4 digit years for the date and time string in MODULE-IDENTITY constructs. The SMI (RFC 2578) states that 2 digit years are interpreted as occurring between 1900 and 1999, and 4 digit years can be used to express any date from 0000 to 9999.
The changes include: * Two and four digit year support for data and time strings in the MODULE-IDENTITY construct. * Validity checking on the order or the REVISION clauses in a MODULE-IDENTITY. * Checking for use of reserved keywords for module and textual convention names * Change of default setting, so that BITS acts like a data type built-in to the language like INTEGER * Addition of a check that an OID value cannot be assigned to a module * Checking that hex strings contain an even number of digits * Checking that binary strings contain a multiple of 8 digits * Removed support of minus sign in front of a hex or binary string (to align with the SMI) * Check that an EXPORTS clause is not specified * Change of the default setting, so that ASN.1 comments are terminated by either end of line or two dashes * Added option to control use of NOLENGTH in SMIv1 MIB modules * Added optional check of use of index objects in the VARIABLES or OBJECTS clause of a TRAP-TYPE or NOTIFICATION-TYPE construct * Added option to allow use of MIN and MAX, which are not allowed by the SMI * Disallowed defining textual conventions based on textual conventions to align with SMI restriction ... and more ...
Not all of the clarifications to the SMI were in alignment with the interpretations used in designing SMICng. Some of the clarifications seem to be poor choices. However, compromises had to be made to move the SMI forward. It is not clear if other MIB compilers have yet been updated to align with the updated SMI.