Dear Shane! On Wed 2003-10-22 (18:45), 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 than the 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.
Please don't make it optional! With that reason you can abolish all other mandatory attributes (like descr, tech-c, admin-c) as well. There will always be lazy people who don't want their data to be as correct as others want. But with Daniel's words: "99.9% accurate info is better than 0% info."
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.
Good idea. Anything *well-defined* which is easy to pe parsed by PERL is good and a single line is easier to parse various or a single one. By the way: I noticed the changes in the RIPE DB you or your colleagues made. Now we have two versions of "country: EU": country: EU (e.g. in 194.60.0.0/15) country: EU # Country is really world wide (e.g. in 141/8) Anything new about the idea with ZZ which sounds good to me? Best regards, Christoph Mohr -- -- Christoph Mohr, BelWue Coordination ---------- mailto:mohr@belwue.de ----- Computing Center University of Stuttgart (RUS) Phone: +49 711 685-2079 Allmandring 30, D-70550 Stuttgart Fax: +49 711 678-8363 ------------------------------------------------- http://www.belwue.de/ -----