Dear colleagues, We have deployed Whois release 1.122 to the Release Candidate environment for testing. We plan to deploy to production on Thursday 30th April. The Whois 1.122 release contains the following changes : * Support UTF-8 in Free Text Attributes ("descr:" and "remarks:"). * NWI-20: Adjusting contact method requirements and adding new methods. * Do not allow "mnt-lower:" on inetnum ASSIGNED PA * Allow user to remove mnt-lower from ASSIGNED resources UTF-8 in Free Text Attributes ("descr:" and "remarks:") Implementation ---------------------------------------------------------------------- We have implemented support for UTF-8 in "descr:" and "remarks:" attributes, as described in the Solution Definition and Impact Analysis: https://mailman.ripe.net/archives/list/db-wg@ripe.net/thread/V363E7FTMOXXZ3U... Be aware that only Unicode code points included in IDNA 2008 are supported. Any unsupported characters are substituted with a "?". In addition to the existing latin-1 encoded dump and split files, we will also be publishing daily dump and split files with UTF-8 encoding, named with a "utf8.gz" extension. These files will be available on the FTP site after the production release at : https://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/dbase/ NWI-20: "Adjusting contact method requirements and adding new methods" Implementation ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We have implemented NWI-20 as described in the Solution Definition: https://mailman.ripe.net/archives/list/db-wg@ripe.net/message/CYCFEN2S3XTY3R... We have implemented the following changes to the object templates: * The "e-mail" attribute becomes mandatory on person. * The "address" attribute becomes optional on both person and role. * The "phone" attribute becomes optional on person. * Added a new "contact:" as an optional attribute type on person, role, organisation, irt. Be aware that the "contact:" attribute value may contain a URI fragment (i.e. a "#" character), for example signal.me (see https://signal.miraheze.org/wiki/Signal.me_URLs). This is normally interpreted as an RPSL comment as defined in RFC 2622. We have decided to treat the URI fragment character in "contact:" attributes as part of the attribute value and *not* as the beginning of a comment. Other Changes ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The full list of changes is visible in the source repository: https://github.com/RIPE-NCC/whois/compare/6a2a42c...052a4c13 The release notes are in DB documentation: https://docs.db.ripe.net/Release-Notes The data in the Release Candidate environment is a dummified copy of production from 13th April. Please let us know if you find any issues with this release in the RC environment. Regards Ed Shryane RIPE NCC