[db-wg] Implementation proposal descr line

Dear Working group, RIPE NCC,

Support was shown for this proposal and no objections were raised after
this round of discussion.

I asked RIPE NCC schedules implementation of this plan as proposed by
Tim (keeping in mind Shane's comment about empty "descr:" attributes).

Thank you all for your time reviewing this!

Kind regards,

Job Snijders
DB-WG Chairs

On Tue, Oct 20, 2015 at 12:23:02PM +0200, Tim Bruijnzeels wrote:
> 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:
> ========================
> 
> = 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.