On Fri, 19 Jul 1996 10:13:53 +0200 (MET DST) David.Kessens@ripe.net wrote:
Names likes this will be rejected in the next release of the updating code. Names should consist of at least two parts, not counting abbreviated parts/titles.
As I have mentioned in the past, there are people who have only one name. If you decide to do this, please make a compile or run-time configuration option that will defeat this syntax check.
Don't worry. I heard already about your concerns. It is supported:
# NROFNAMES # # minimal number of components that a name should consist of
NROFNAMES 2
I'm not convinced that enforcing the name to exist of 2 words is really going to solve the problem. There are a couple of problems here: 1. People enter names in the database with an illegal format: U. Schultz Miss Emma Peel Smith (Joe Smith, but only the last name) 2. Namespace collisions, which are more likely the smaller and the more common the key is (I have not found somebody else with my name yet, but it is more likely that 'Smith' collides with something else) With the growth of the Internet, I believe that using people's names as (exclusive) search key is no longer sufficient. 3. In some areas of the world (India?), people *really* have only one name. Making the database resistent against these names doesn't help: I see no reason to lock them out from using other registries then the APNIC 'names fix' version. Rather than locking out people from India, I believe that the correct approach is to enforce people to use NIC handles. We have been migrating to that for quite some time, and maybe now is the time to cut over. We all know that NIC handles work quite well; there is already much operational experience with this as it is used in day-to-day operation. There may still be a couple of small open issues but most of them have been dragging around for a long time and they will be resolved much more quickly once NIC handles are enforced. As to the 'illegal name' issue, I wonder if there are places where the correct spelling of names allows a dot in the first word or the last word (middle words are OK). This would allow cases like: David R. Conrad but blocks cases like: Prof. Jones U. Schultz This check isn't perfect, but is reasonable because it catches most common mistakes, and the ones that are left are harmless. My stuiver's worth, Geert Jan