RPSL: Providers exchanging full tables.

Hi,

Mr. Nipper had pointed out an interesting issue with our as-macro recently, I believe its the first situation we've come across that isn't easily depicted within an RPSL routing policy without the requirement to manually update multiple near identical objects.

The situation arises when we exchange full route tables with another provider, we then in turn should announce their prefixes listed in their macro onto our other providers and they too should do the same for our respective macro. So by adding each others macros to each others macros, we effectively create loops.

Now is this a real problem ?

In my opinion, I don't think it is, I believe that to truly understand the policy between two peers you have to take into account more (aut-num/import/export) than just the contents of an as-macro and that any tool that uses as-macros to generate prefix lists should check for duplicates and loops. It also appears that the tools we use today (RtConfig/peval) are not adversely effected by providers listing each others macros, output is as expected.

Does anyone else have a view on this or a good idea of how it can be easily depicted within RPSL ?

Cheers,
Adam