On 07/08/2015 15:12, denis wrote:
Hi Ingrid
On 07/08/2015 12:56, Ingrid Wijte wrote:
Hi Job and others,
The reason we suggested a clean up was because it's an opportunity to get rid of cruft. This is not just good housekeeping, but primarily because maintaining the data comes with certain expectations from the people who use it, which are often the result of habits that go back years.
If we quietly stop enforcing the contents of descr: and don't clean up anything, we are concerned this will lead to the confusion that was outlined in the original post with the three alternatives: "names left there will start to differ from the names in the referenced organisation objects - which are enforced by RIPE NCC. It may not be clear to users where to look for this information and where to change it. And it may lead to situations where people wrongfully assume that the RIPE NCC is still enforcing the "descr:" line."
This is why we think option B is the clearest approach, taking all users – both those who enter and use data – into account. We can start with a clean slate and send a clear message to every user.
I think this is a good approach. It is not good management to leave redundant data in the database especially as it will diverge from the authoritative version of that data. People should also note that there is only a small window of opportunity for the RIPE NCC to do this cleanup effectively. That is at the moment the constraint on the "descr:" attribute is dropped. After that the divergence of the data will start and then it becomes impossible to do a full cleanup.
this is definitely the time to do this, so that the descr: hack can be finally removed from the database. It was only ever suitable as a temporary workaround to handle the lack of org: objects. Nick