davidk@isi.edu writes: * * John, * * I am afraid that the people that forget the "source:" field are the same * people that send a "source: RADB/MCI/whatever" to the RIPE database. You * will thus get more consistency problems if those people find out about * the possibility to omit the "source:" field. We are dealing with a set of * logical different databases and I think that it is better that people * *know* about this to avoid all the possible confusion about where their * data is stored and mistakes made by people that have to deal with more * databases then just the RIPE one. The letting them know would occur when they recieve warnings, or in the case of an incorrect "source:" have the update fail. People are clearly told that they need to put in a source field in the documents, the ones I see most are where people forget to add a source field, even if they know about the different databases. They just forget, a warning should be enough for these people to remember next time. * Another problem is that many people don't really like the automatic * fiddling with their objects which also makes it very hard to do things * (in the future) like signing objects by the user itself and storing them * as-is including the signature in the database. We do this already with some fields. inetnum gets changed if they send in ... inetnum: 194.0.1.0 or inetnum: 194.0.1.0/24 ... to inetnum: 194.0.1.0 - 194.0.1.255 The changed field can also be fiddled with, i.e if the date is in the future. These are both cases where the database needs a particular format and can therefor make the change. I would suggest that the "source:" could be a similar case. Is there a reason that I am missing why the "source:" differs from these when it comes to "signatures" etc. * On the other hand I really like this since I am a lazy person and I have * to admit that I have a local db running as my address book that does * exactly the thing that you propose ... Kind regards, John Crain RIPE NCC * * David K. * ---