Proposal for db change

John,

John LeRoy Crain writes:
> 
>  davidk at isi.edu writes:
>  * 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.

My experience was that warnings don't help much :-( since many people
don't even look at their ACK messages. An error usually gives the best
incentive to fix things and I would rather deal with somebody that tells
that there was an error with a missing 'source:' field then to try to
find an object that was sent to the wrong database or even worse is
present in more then one database which can give interesting problems
when you use the routing registry to configure your routers ... 

>  * 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.

Yup, there are many fields were the software 'fiddles' with users data.
My opinion is not to make it worse when the benefits are not entirely
obvious.

David K.
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