Re: Use of advisory attribute

[David Kessens <]

Shane,

On Fri, Nov 03, 2000 at 02:47:42PM +0100, Shane Kerr wrote:
> 
> I've been looking over the 'advisory' attribute, mostly in preparation
> for the upcoming RIPE-181 to RPSL conversion (RPSL does not have this
> attribute).
> 
> The advisory attribute itself suffers from a severe lack of
> documentation.  In the current database documents, we see the following:
> 
>   RIPE-157: listed as for the route object, with the format 
>             <ASnnnn> <as-specific information>
> 
>   RIPE-181: not present
> 
>   RIPE-189: in the route template only

You can find the following if you do a search for 'advisory attribute'
on the RIPE NCC's own webpage:

The documentation is here:

  ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/docs/ripe-131.txt

  (note that I didn't invent this ugly attribute, 
   I was the one who documented it ...)

  and in:

  http://www.ripe.net/ripe/wg/db/r25-db.html:

  Brian Renaud proposed to obsolete the advisory: attribute for
  aut-num: objects. For 'route:' objects, these atrtributes should
  remain valid. Ther was general agreement and the NCC was asked to
  implement that change.

It doesn't look like we ever made a decision about also obsoleting it
for the 'route:' class. But as has been said before on this, they are
not really relevant anymore and should be removed (note that this has
nothing to do with RPSL, RPSL only defines the attributes that are
relevant for RPSL itself and doesn't say that you can't have an
'advisory' attribute any longer).

> So, some questions are:  Is there a BCP for this attribute?  And can
> anyone explain how and why it is used?  Can somebody suggest an
> alternative method to obtain the same results in RPSL?  And finally,
> what should the method be during RIPE-181 to RPSL conversion?

Delete it as is done in the ripe2rpsl conversion script that was
written by me and Cengiz:

...

    #
    # delete as-exclude/advisory attributes
                           
    delete($entry{"ae"});
    delete($entry{"av"});

...

David K.
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