[db-wg] Proposal: DB object syntax change

Dear Piotr,

The RIPE Database release 1.71 that was deployed to production this week
was prepared in the beginning of December. Any issues reported
afterwards that were not critical for the user were scheduled to be
fixed in version 1.72, which we were working on at that time.

Just before the last RIPE Meeting (RIPE 67) we did a major review of the
update and query manuals, which solved many of the issues following on
from the software re-development project. As announced during the RIPE
Database Working Group session at RIPE 67, we will continue to make
further improvements to the documentation as it is quite difficult to
maintain in its current state.

The first action, which we’ve already taken, is to better incorporate
the documentation updates in our release procedure. For any new release,
the related documentation is reviewed and updated. This ensures that any
new features and changes are properly documented. This does not mean
that the current documentation is flawless. With changes that slipped
through a long time ago it will take some time to find them all. Please
bear with us on this and you can expect more improvements related to the
documentation in the near future.

The RIPE NCC welcomes any suggestions from the community on how we can 
do this better and we are grateful that you report any inconsistencies 
you find to us.

Regards,
Denis Walker
Business Analyst
RIPE NCC Database Team


On 05/02/2014 17:18, Piotr Strzyzewski wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 05, 2014 at 04:08:38PM +0100, Agoston Horvath wrote:
>
> Dear Agoston
>
>> On 02/05/2014 11:22 AM, Piotr Strzyzewski wrote:
>>> This is very good point. However when I tried to reproduce it I have got
>>> another error:
>>>
>>> $ whois 'test !*&[] test'
>>>
>>> %ERROR:101: no entries found
>>>
>>> While using https://apps.db.ripe.net/search/query.html search form I
>>> have got 'Warning! No objects matched your search criteria.'
>>>
>>> So, I created the ORGANISATION object with the org-name filled with
>>> 'test !*&[] test' (without quotes) and I was able to query it by name as
>>> described above.
>>
>> Thank you for your valuable input.
>>
>> This restriction has been relaxed during the reimplementation project.
>>
>> Currently, the restrictions on queries are:
>> - maximum 1024 bytes;
>> - represents an UTF-8 encoded string.
>
> Good to know. Thanks.
>
>>> I know that documentation is currently outdated. For example
>>> <person-name> is defined as not allowing '"Dr", "Prof", "Mv", "Ms",
>>> "Mr", no matter whether they end with dot (".") or not', which is not
>>> true anymore.
>>
>> This issue has been fixed and will be part of the upcoming release
>> 1.72 of the RIPE Database Software.
>>
>>> Taking this into account I could imagine that this %ERROR:108: is also
>>> outdated or changed in some way. Could this be possibly confirmed by
>>> someone from NCC?
>>
>> We are very sorry that you encountered outdated information. We are
>> striving to keep our reference manuals up to date, and will make sure
>> this is fixed shortly.
>
> Please excuse me for my scepticism about that.
>
> I have been told about the inconsistency with <person-name> by one of
> the NCC staff members on 20th of December 2013. I can imagine that
> someone forgot about that piece of documentation during the re-developed
> of the software (which was done a year ago as I was told). However, one
> month later there have been released the new version of RIPE DB software
> and it seems that no-one took care about corecting the documentation.
> And, sad to say, it seems from my perspective that it was necessary to
> write about that inconsistency loudly at this mailing list to force
> someone to take care about that. :(
>
> May I suggest the in-depth inspection of RIPE DB documentation? It seems
> that we (the users) cannot be sure how many inconsistecies like those
> two are still there.
>
> Best regards,
> Piotr
>