[db-wg] Implementation plan for replacing "changed:" with "last-modified:" and "created:" published

On Mon, Feb 02, 2015 at 12:02:28PM +0100, Tim Bruijnzeels wrote:

> > Both might have data protection aspects (cf. Piotr's mail <20140912093643.GH8166 at hydra.ck.polsl.pl>
> > dated 12 Sep 2014) and the labs article is silent about this.
> 
> --list-versions and --show-version are not available for Person and Role objects for this reason, and we have no current plans to change that.

thanks, Tim, for clarifying this.  For person/role objects, there
remains a tiny aspect then that will be slightly different from
before.  While many maintainers keep all changed: attributes and
often enough the first one equals the creation date, an explicit
"created:" (modulo all uncertainties about legacy data) will show
a person's "age" in the DB.  That's not necessarily a showstopper
(could be mitigated if need be), but could benefit from a sentence
or two.  There are lots of reasons why one might _want_ to see this,
but the real need isn't as obvious to me as is the last-modified:
timestamp.

And, btw, that also holds for the output of person handles in the context
of other object types' histories.

> That said, technically, the working group could explore the idea of authenticated queries. In theory we could allow authorised maintainers of objects to see the history of these objects. I believe that data protection concerns would not apply in that case. We may also be able to supply more information in future for *authenticated* queries only - such as which maintainer, or when auth is introduced on person objects, which person made a change. We currently do get questions about updates from users from time to time, because it's not clear to them which of their colleagues made a change.

Sounds reasonable to me.  Don't know how many person objects are
multi maintained, but for a 1:1 relationship, the scheme above should
work well.

-Peter