Dear George,

I am worried that there may be *external* referencees to objects, and while we have no 'contractual' obligation it might not be nice to do this to people without some engagement but I expect most people would welcome losing a path to spam.

without going into any detail of the proposal itself, I perceive the fact that there are external references (allowed) _without "consent" and without documentation_ a major flaw in the architecture. In fact, there are mechanisms available already (at least in the RIPE DB-SW V2.x and V3.x) that allow us to deal with that requirement: maintainer objects.

As to automatic sweeping, I think there are problems with link counting which are similar to those we've faced in discussing cross-database linkage and references. Too many risks of the link count getting out of whack.

Fair enough, a very valid concern! But I think the proposal is trying to describe the "user view" and the "abstract behaviour".

I think you could use it as a guide to a sweep, but not as a determinant without some review and other checks. Eg to trigger more exhaustive checks to see if there are are references in twisty ways.

I agree.

cheers -George

Cheers, and thanks for partcipating in this discussion! Wilfried.