James Aldridge wrote:
If people change jobs then it should be possible to perform an inverse query on the changed field in the same way as the admin-c, tech-c, etc. to permit updating of all affected records. but why should one want to change, after the fact, the information about who changed an entry in the past? Or just replace the old changed: line by a new one? That would probably give false indication about the validity of the data contained in the entry.
If the time stamp is used to prevent out-of-sequence updates (if an update to auto-dbm gets held up in a mail queue somewhere, for example) then it has to remain part of the database entry and is not meta-information. Agreed. But this is open for review. There are better prerequisites to check before modifying or deleting an entry (e.g. a hash of the object, not including any "changed" information).
Bottom line: I would like to see the latest modification date of an object in response to any database query and an indication of an entity responsible for this entry. "mnt-by" may serve that purpose if it is in there. -Peter