[db-wg] [ncc-announce] [news] RIPE Database: Cleaning-up Organisation Names in "descr:"

On 2016 Apr 25 (Mon) at 14:03:32 +0200 (+0200), Tim Bruijnzeels wrote:
:Dear Akil Evlat,
:
:When the change was discussed in this working group, it was concluded
:that this change should not affect any routing operations. And indeed,
:after we modified just over 93 thousand resource objects we received not
:a single report about operational issues. 

As one who did report issues, I must disagree.

We can debate what "operational issues" mean, but my objects having a
new "name" on various 3rd party services _is_ an issue that is a problem.

We set those entries with care.  Hell, (let's bring up something older)
we even used changed: correctly!  (side note: changed: could have ALSO
been used for us to understand why this changed happened)

A number of people are very concerned that their objects will be
modified without concern that these values have been chosen on purpose.

What is the criteria for selecting which objects will be changed?  Not
set to the previous default?  Multiple lines?


:We rolled this change back
:because of issues with whitespace and a concern raised that a warning
:should have gone out to ncc-announce, but it's important to note that as
:far as we can tell there were indeed no operational issues affecting
:*routing*.
:

Is *routing* the only thing that the database cares about?  If that's
true, there is a lot of things I can stop doing in the database, and all
sorts of objects that can be deleted.

Is that really what you are saying?


:Where this would affect operations is w.r.t. to look ups. I believe your allocation objects currently only have one "descr:" entry with your organisation name. So in your case the clean-up would mean that your allocation objects would have no remaining "descr:" attribute, but do keep a reference to your organisation through the "org:". 
:
:So people doing ad-hoc lookups, or tools that show the organisation associated with a resource should now follow the reference to the organisation object instead.
:
:This is good advice in general because the "descr:" attribute may be blank, as it's now optional (even without the clean-up), or it may have something that looks like an organisation name - but it's not kept in sync with the organisation name that the RIPE NCC verifies, and in case of more specific int(6)num objects under allocations or legacy objects it can contain any text entered by the holder of the object. So in short: it has never been possible to trust that "descr:" has the organisation name for all resource objects in the database, even more so now that users can modify it for allocations and assignments done through RIPE NCC.
:
:
:Kind regards,
:
:Tim Bruijnzeels
:

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