View source for Template:FAQ:MIBs 07

The way that comments are handled in a MIB file is subtly different
to the equivalent syntax in most typical programming languages, and
this difference can catch out the unwary.  In particular, there are
two common situations which can lead to problems.
        
The first scenario is where the MIB designer has attempted to "comment
out" an unwanted line that already contains a comment: 

        --   broken ::= { myMIB 1 }   -- This isn't working yet

The assumption here is that a comment continues to the end of the line.
Unfortunately, this is not correct.  A comment will continue either to
the end of the line, ''or'' the next occurance of a pair of dashes.

Thus in this case, the definition of "broken" is commented out (as
untended) but the following text ("This isn't working yet") is treated
as an active part of the MIB, and will generate an error.


The second scenario is where a line of dashes has been used to mark
out separate parts of a MIB file.  Depending on the exact number of
dashes used, this may still result in a syntactically valid MIB file,
but has a 1-in-4 possibility of triggering an error.  This means that
this particular situation can be particularly difficult to spot!


Most of the Net-SNMP applications have a command-line option (<CODE>-Pc</CODE>) which
will work around this problem by treating the whole line as a comment.
But this is not strictly legal, and the offending MIB file should really
be corrected.