I am not sure how feasible the mandatory "-mnt" would be at this point tbh. I can easily think of at least 2 maintainers that are actually used that I see quite often that wouldn't fit that pattern. There are probably a considerable amount of maintainers that do not follow this pattern in fact...
$ grep -P 'mntner:\s+(?:(?!mnt\-|MNT\-|MAINT\-|maint\-).(?!\-MNT|\-mnt|\-maint|\-MAINT))+$' ripe.db.mntner | wc -l 6990 $ grep -P 'mntner:\s+' ripe.db.mntner | wc -l 56524 I don't think we can make 12% of people change their maintainer for this purpose. - Cynthia On Wed, Jul 1, 2020 at 6:28 PM Job Snijders via db-wg <[email protected]> wrote: > Dear Tom, > > On Wed, Jul 1, 2020, at 16:16, Tom Hill via db-wg wrote: > > Unless of course, parsing/filtering before insertion (thus augmenting > > the database's table natural design restrictions) is not something Good > > To Do. Database design definitely isn't my primary skill. > > > > Saying that, I have long been idly frustrated by the way that mntners > > seemingly have a reversible, unwritten standard of 'MNT-[random]' or > > '[random]-MNT'. I can't be the only one. > > It is possible to change this, but it'll take some time: extensive > research to figure out a path which causes the least disruption to the > fewest amount of people. Ideally only a handful of people have to change > their "mntner:" primary key. > > I think a mandatory "-MNT" or "MNT-" or "-MAINT" is helpful because the > maintainers primary key string does pop up from time to time without any > context, and this can lead to confusion. See > https://seclists.org/nanog/2020/Jan/650 for a fun story about how one > person's email error code is another person's BGP autonomous system > reference. :-) > > It starts with a volunteer who does some digging in the data to see if a > migration path can be constructed or not. A conclusion may be that it is > too hard, but we don't know yet. Are you up for it? :) > > Kind regards, > > Job > >
