John, John LeRoy Crain writes:
I was sitting here getting annoyed at people who forget to add "source:" fields when I had a thought;
Would it be useful to have the "source:" field added automatically when people forget it?
I am assuming here that all updates to auto-dbm@ripe.net should contain "source: RIPE".
The update could take place and a warning could be issued.
_______________________
Warning
"source:" field missing
The field "source: RIPE" has been added to your object.
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My experience is that many people forget to add "source:" fields and the objects get rejected. As the field should always be the same would it not be useful to update it and generate a warning?
I am afraid that the people that forget the "source:" field are the same people that send a "source: RADB/MCI/whatever" to the RIPE database. You will thus get more consistency problems if those people find out about the possibility to omit the "source:" field. We are dealing with a set of logical different databases and I think that it is better that people *know* about this to avoid all the possible confusion about where their data is stored and mistakes made by people that have to deal with more databases then just the RIPE one. Another problem is that many people don't really like the automatic fiddling with their objects which also makes it very hard to do things (in the future) like signing objects by the user itself and storing them as-is including the signature in the database. On the other hand I really like this since I am a lazy person and I have to admit that I have a local db running as my address book that does exactly the thing that you propose ... David K. ---