On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, Shane Kerr wrote:
Daniel Karrenberg wrote:
On 10.10 11:20, Hank Nussbacher wrote:
Indeed, because of this reason, it might be good idea to obsolete "country:" attribute in the inetnums. What do you think about this?
Please don't.99.9% accurate info is better than 0% info.
I agree with Hank. One has to clearly differentiate between *hard* info that needs as close to 100% accuracy as one can get, and *soft* info that is still useful even when full accuracy cannot be guaranteed.
Examples of hard info are address space allocation and assignment chains. country: is an example of soft info.
Removing an attribute because its information is becoming too soft should only be done when the usefulness is much less thanthe current country:.
Perhaps we should make it optional then.People who want to maintain the information can keep it up to date, and people who want to use the information will have greater certainty that if the attribute is there that it is correct.
I wouldn't make it optional, but I very much like your idea below but will cause havoc on all those automated scripty things out there pulling out the country tag and assuming a 2 character string. If you make the change remember to post to many Internet lists so everyone knows of the change. -Hank
Also, I suggest that it may make sense to make it list-valued.Right now it is:
country: [mandatory] [multiple] [ ]
So users who have networks in multiple countries and want to document have to do things like:
country: NL country: BE country: DE
Or worse, things like:
country: NL # BE DE
Allowing the use of:
country:NL, BE, DE
Would solve this issue.
-- Shane Kerr RIPE NCC
Hank Nussbacher