Proposal for db change

John,

John LeRoy Crain writes:
> 
> I was sitting here getting annoyed at people who forget to
> add "source:" fields when I had a thought;
> 
> Would it be useful to have the "source:" field added automatically
> when people forget it?
> 
> I am assuming here that all updates to auto-dbm at ripe.net should
> contain "source: RIPE". 
> 
> The update could take place and a warning could be issued.
> 
> _______________________
> 
> Warning
> 
> "source:" field missing
> 
> The field "source: RIPE" has been added to your object.
> 
> _______________________
> 
> My experience is that many people forget to add "source:" fields and
> the objects get rejected. As the field should always be the same
> would it not be useful to update it and generate a warning?

I am afraid that the people that forget the "source:" field are the same
people that send a "source: RADB/MCI/whatever" to the RIPE database. You
will thus get more consistency problems if those people find out about
the possibility to omit the "source:" field. We are dealing with a set of
logical different databases and I think that it is better that people
*know* about this to avoid all the possible confusion about where their
data is stored and mistakes made by people that have to deal with more
databases then just the RIPE one.

Another problem is that many people don't really like the automatic
fiddling with their objects which also makes it very hard to do things
(in the future) like signing objects by the user itself and storing them
as-is including the signature in the database.

On the other hand I really like this since I am a lazy person and I have
to admit that I have a local db running as my address book that does
exactly the thing that you propose ...

David K.
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