from Michael van Elst <mlelstv@xlink.net> Hi,
This would obviously help the registries but other users of the RIPE-DB might be left out by this solution.
"Other users" are not really interested in the real e-mail address of changer. This field is needed only by administrators who want to delete the object because they have to send back the exact copy of the record.
well, that's a kind of broad statement comparable to the "no user would need more than 640k". Won't you think ? For me the changed records help to track down the person who modified the record and who could possibly tell what was changed and why it was changed. Of course you cannot trust the records, but it gives strong hints. from gerald@merit.edu In my mind it is tough to make the argument to keep email addresses in the changed field because it helps you know the person to make the last change. You can specify the "mnt-nfy:" attribute in the maintainer or "notify:" attribute in the object to have an email message sent which give the email header of the person who made the udpate. You always have a problem in situations like this when you want to make a change to the database registry to something that has been around a long time. There are always going to be users who don't want to change things for whatever reason. eg, I still have people tell me they use the old ANS "advisory:" field which I think has been obsoleted for quite some time now. So even a proposal to get rid of the "advisory:" field would meet with some resistence. My $0.02, the "changed:" field as it is is worse than useless. The information that goes in it right now belongs either in a "descr:" field if someone chooses or not in the db at all. And there is a legitimate privacy issue which needs to be addressed. I am in favor of keeping the "changed:" field. I feel it should contain the UTC machine generated time stamp of the last update and that's it. We would know the last update and I also feel we (someday) need a mechanism for dealing with legacy objects, ie, objects that have been abandoned. A *real* time stamp along with real routing announcement information would go a long way into dealing with this problem. --jerry