Proposal for db change

 davidk at isi.edu writes:
 * 
 * John,
 *
 * 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.

The letting them know would occur when they recieve warnings, or in
the case of an incorrect "source:" have the update fail. 

People are clearly told that they need to put in a source field in the
documents, the ones I see most are where people forget to add a source
field, even if they know about the different databases. They just
forget, a warning should be enough for these people to remember
next time.


 * 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.

We do this already with some fields. inetnum gets changed if they
send in ...

inetnum:	194.0.1.0

or 

inetnum:	194.0.1.0/24

... to

inetnum:	194.0.1.0 - 194.0.1.255


The changed field can also be fiddled with, i.e if the date is in
the future.

These are both cases where the database needs a particular format
and can therefor make the change. I would suggest that the "source:"
could be a similar case. 

Is there a reason that I am missing why the "source:" differs
from these when it comes to "signatures" etc.



 * 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 ...


Kind regards,

John Crain
RIPE NCC

 * 
 * David K.
 * ---