[address-policy-wg] 2012-03 New Draft Document Published (Intra-RIR Transfer Policy Proposal)

I agree with this proposal.


That being said...

On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 10:27 PM, Tore Anderson <
tore.anderson at redpill-linpro.com> wrote:



> As a general feedback to the draft document page, not specific to
> 2012-03, I find it preferable if the «original text» and «new text»
> boxes are made as small as absolutely possible.

[...]

Agreed.

I have tried to raise this general point with RIPE repeatedly in the past
with very little success. Maybe we could garner enough support for this now
:)


The documents we are dealing with are almost exclusively plain text. This
is the _perfect_ use case for version control systems. Not relying on one,
both internally and externally, seems archaic and error-prone, to me.

Released documents would be in master, allowing anyone to clone a full copy
for their convenience while _knowing_ that it is a complete and up-to-date
copy. PDPs would be maintained in branches, updates to a PDP would be done
by means of commits in the respective branches.

If a PDP is successful, it's merged back into master.
If not, it either lives on as a stale branch or gets moved into a special
archive directory before being merged back into master.


This would:

* Keep diffs at the bare minimum in size
* Allow everyone to display changes in the way they like best
* Provide a single, canonical, up-to-date reference of all valid documents
* Allow anyone to use their favorite text handling tool to view documents
and changes
* Ensure complete logging of all changes
* Introduce more accountability
* Allow statistical and other analysis
* Enable anyone to find out when a particular line last changed within
seconds (think `git blame`)
* Allow proposals to be sent to RIPE by means of a patch, reducing mistakes
and overhead on all sides
* Propel this process forward into the 90ies of the last century ;)


Personally, I would like to use git as the tool for this job, but any
reasonably recent VCS under a FLOSS license would be better than the status
quo.


I would also be glad to help RIPE implement such a system and migrate to it.


Depending on the amount of feedback this receives, it may be prudent to
move this discussion somewhere else.



Richard
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