[db-wg] Implementation proposal descr line

Dear working groups,

Following discussion in this group it was decided that the RIPE NCC should stop enforcing that the first "descr:" attribute of resource objects reflects the name of the organisation, for resources that it alloced or assigned. This practice has been place for a long time, but now that all such objects have a reference to an organisation object and the RIPE NCC ensures that this reflects the resource requests, this is no longer needed.

Furthermore it was decided that the RIPE NCC should clean up existing organisation names in "descr:" attributes in order to:
(1) avoid confusion about where the organisation name should be found;
(2) avoid that the names here are different from the name of the actual organisation;
(3) make it very clear which attributes are verified by RIPE NCC, and which attributes are not.

Hereby the RIPE NCC would like to propose an implementation plan for these changes. We invite the working group to review and discuss if needed. As soon as the working group co-chairs formally call consensus, we can proceed to implement shortly.

Implementation proposal:
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= Change "descr:" to an 'optional multiple' attribute

We believe that the working group concluded that it would be appropriate to make "descr:" optional. The reason is that when the organisation name is cleaned up, there may be no description lines left. The working group considered whether the attribute should be 'single optional', but there seemed to be no strong preference for this, and it would have a bigger impact. Therefore we propose to go for the easier option of making it 'optional multiple'.

Technically this change is not hard to do on the server side, but can impact users of the database because there may be no "descr:" attribute, and this can affect parsers.

Because this can have an impact on automated systems the RIPE NCC will announce this change ncc-announce at ripe.net, and use a longer week staging period in the Release Candidate environment allowing users to test and update their systems.

Dependent on formal consensus call we may be able to combine this with the upcoming release for deprecating "changed:" phase 3, to avoid delays.

= Clean up existing "descr:" attributes where RIPE NCC enforced the organisation name

The RIPE NCC will remove the "descr:" attributes that it has been enforcing.

= Add "descr:" to allocation object editor in LIR Portal

So that LIRs can edit this themselves.

= Stop setting the "descr:" on new allocations or assignments done by the RIPE NCC

We will leave "descr:" blank. It can be edited by the LIR or end-user later.