[ncc-announce] [service] The "changed:" attribute will be deprecated from the RIPE Database release on Monday, 1 February 2016

Dear colleagues,

As requested by the RIPE Database Working Group, the RIPE NCC has been working on deprecating the “changed:” attribute in the RIPE Database. This attribute was used mostly to determine when database objects were last changed, but in practice the attribute was poorly maintained. We are now in the process of replacing the “changed:” attribute by the server-generated attributes “created:” and “last-modified”.

We are conducting the replacement in three phases*:

1. (Completed) 28 April 2015 “created:” and “last-modified:” were introduced to all objects
2. (Completed) 13 July 2015 “changed:” became optional for all objects
3. 1 February 2016 “changed:” will be deprecated from all objects

When phase 3 is deployed to production we will remove the “changed:” attribute from all objects in the RIPE Database. However, contrary to the earlier plan communicated on this, we will not reject object updates if they include the “changed:” attribute. Instead, we will remove the “changed:” attribute from the object and issue a warning, but accept the remaining object (provided it passed other validation rules). The reason for this is that we still see a large number of updates that include the “changed:” attribute. We expect this number to go down over time when the “changed:” attribute is removed from the object templates, and when the attribute is no longer present on objects that are being updated. We will monitor this carefully over the coming months before implementing stricter regulations concerning the attribute.

However, users are still strongly advised to exclude the "changed:" attribute in updates, but rather to rely on "created:" and "last-modified:", or use "remarks:" instead.

Phase 3 was deployed to the RIPE Database Release Candidate environment on 22 December, and an announcement was sent to the RIPE Database Working Group along with a request to test the changes and report issues to the RIPE NCC. No issues have been reported so far. If no issues are found over the coming two weeks, it is our intention to deploy this release to production on Monday, 1 February. 

With this email we also want to make sure that those who are not following the RIPE Database Working Group discussions are aware of this pending change and have an opportunity to run their own tests.

Please let us know if you have any comments or concerns,

Kind regards,

Tim Bruijnzeels
Assistant Manager Software Engineering
RIPE NCC


*: https://labs.ripe.net/Members/tim/deprecating-the-changed-attribute-in-the-ripe-database