[db-wg] Validation on "org-name:" syntax (double spaces and newlines)

Dear Lu,

> On 12 Nov 2017, at 15:03, Lu Heng <h.lu at anytimechinese.com> wrote:
> 
> I would prefer option 1, because it can make things easier for guys not familiar with unix system.

I am not sure that I follow. But I realise I was incomplete in my statement. If people use the web interface to update their organisation object then we will make sure that we reject incorrect input and give a clear error message.

So, option 1 vs 2 is applicable only, when people submit updates through other means, or through automated tools, e.g. syncupdates or mailupdates. I don’t see how avoiding multi-whitespace (or a multi-line) values is any harder on windows in these cases. Option 2 is the least surprising - no magic changes. Option 1 could be good if unattended scripts would otherwise break and stay broken, but given that we are talking around 0.1% of objects I doubt that this is a real world issue.

Tim


> 
> 
> On Sun, Nov 12, 2017 at 07:35 Tim Bruijnzeels via db-wg <db-wg at ripe.net> wrote:
> Dear Working Group,
> 
> Out of 114181 ORGANISATION objects, 112 objects use multiple consecutive whitespace in the “org-name:” attribute and only 1 uses a multi-line value. While this is a tiny fraction these objects are a bit problematic to us when we verify that the “org-name:” matches the name of the organisation that we allocated or assigned resources to in our records. We also believe that this is highly confusing to users and tools parsing these objects.
> 
> Therefore we like to clean these objects up and remove any multi-whitespace or multi-line occurrences. We can of course follow up with these organisation individually, but the reason that I bring it up here is that we also want to have stricter syntax rules in place to prevent this from happening again. We can do either of the following:
> 
> 1) replace multi-whitespace or multi-line occurrences on input (warn, but just strip the additional space)
> 2) reject multi-whitespace or multi-line occurrences on input
> 
> I am leaning towards option 2, but I would value your input.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Tim Bruijnzeels
> Assistant Manager Software Engineering and Senior Technology Officer
> RIPE NCC
> -- 
> --
> Kind regards.
> Lu
>