Adding nic handles to contact objects without one (72 chars/line)

Joao Luis Silva Damas writes:
> - If there is no object with the referenced name then the referencing
> object is at least partially orphaned.  This issue will also be
> addressed by the DB consistency project and may eventually need further
> policy decisions in the future, to be discussed by the community. 

Since I was thinking about the orphaned object problem for quite some
time and just forgot to bring up the topic in January I might just
jump in here.

I'd propose a machine generated ``orphan'' timestamp on each person
object.  This would allow to kick out all orphaned objects after a
certain grace period (maybe 6 month), which probably will get rid of
quite a number of person objects no longer needed.

A machine generated ``orphan'' timestamp is different from a machine
generated change timestamp in that the change timestamp only gets
updated whenever the object itself is changed whereas the ``orphan''
timestamp get set whenever the link counter is reduced to 0, i.e. the
object becomes orphaned.

This would greatly enhance DB house cleaning, since very few people
seem to remove or even to worry about their orphaned objects.

The grace period of 6 month (just as a suggestion) gives plenty of
time to introduce a new person object an then have the national NIC
delegate a domain and create the referencing domain object.

I can think of several ways to implement an ``orphan'' timestamp--it
doesn't nessecarily need to be a real _timestamp_, it might be a count
down timer of some sort, which would even allow reducing its size.

-- 
Ulf Kieber                                 email: kieber at ga-telecom.net
Network Engineer                           voice: +49-69-299896-21
Global Access Telecommunications, Inc.     fax  : +49-69-299896-66
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