Colleagues There have been a number of cosmetic changes to the RIPE Database in recent months. There is no agreed procedure for making these type of changes. In particular the extent to which the community is informed. Examples of the type of changes we are talking about are: 1/ When the ORGANISATION object addresses were synced with the internal registry the address lines were entered in the wrong order. The RIPE NCC did a cosmetic update to reverse the order of the address lines. It had no operational impact at all. 2/ Capitalisation of status values. Again this had no operational impact at all.
We would like some feedback from the community about how you want these type of cosmetic changes announced. We see four possible options: 1/ individual notification in advance to all affected maintainers plus general announcement on the mailing list plus update notifications (full disclosure) 2/ general announcement on the mailing list plus update notifications 3/ general announcement on mailing list and silent update (no notifications) 4/ no announcement, no notifications, just do it without disturbing anyone (totally silent) Some points to note: -In all cases the object history will show the changes. -There is also an option to not change the "last-modified:" attribute if you don't want that to reflect cosmetic changes. -The full disclosure option (1) can sometimes lead to considerable extra work load for the RIPE NCC. If people are individually told in advance of a change they don't always realise it has no operational impact and ask questions. Every question opens a ticket that needs to be manually addressed. -Perhaps options 2 or 3 are the most practical? Your feedback is welcomed... cheers denis co-chair DB-WG
