Niall O'Reilly via db-wg wrote on 23/11/2022 18:17:
What I have in mind is AS-NIALLSPECIAL, which I populate with a list of
AS numbers which I want to advertise to let others know that these
are to be handled in some special way, unlike those in AS-NIALLNORMAL.
According to operational circumstances, there might be periods, even
long ones, with nothing special going on; AS-NIALLSPECIAL would then be
empty, but only for as long as this continued to be the case.
this ^^^ is one of the failure modes.
It would not be safe to assume that empty as-sets named in RPSL policies
are unused. It would be less unsafe to assume that unreferenced as-sets
are unused. A reasonable middle ground might be - after the proposed
new unqualified as-set block has been implemented - to check out all
unreferenced as-sets older than a specific period of time and flag those
for deletion.
It would also be worthwhile inspecting rpsl in other IRRDBs to see if
there are any references. The reason for this is that lots of people
use tools like bgpq3 / peval / etc, and query aggregate IRRDBs, e.g.
RADB, NTT, etc.
So if you have RPSL in another IRRDB and this references an empty as-set
in the RIPE IRRDB, that definition may be picked up in preference to
other as-set definitions. I.e. by removing an as-set definition in the
RIPE IRRDB, it could unexpectedly influence routing policies elsewhere.
These are corner cases, but they should show why some care will be
needed to figure out whether deleting these objects is a good idea.
Nick
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