HI Job On 11/05/2016 02:00, Job Snijders wrote:
Hi Denis,
On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 01:48:33AM +0200, denis wrote:
We have been in this situation many times in the past where an attribute has been deprecated or its value has been suspect for some reason.
What we did in the past was to make the suspect/deprecated attribute into a "remarks:" attribute.
Sometimes this approach was used, but certainly not always.
This addresses both concerns raised in response to your discussion in this case. The old value is still there but it is clear it is not a reliable description. Those who want to keep that value can simply remove the "remarks:" tag. Those who don't want it can delete the attribute. After maybe 6 months you can do a final cleanup and remove any old value that has been left as a "remarks:".
Had the attribute been an actual "user-owned" attribute, the "remarks:" approach might have made more sense, but this is not the case.
Thanks for chiming in,
Job
ps. It still annoys me somewhat that the "remarks: For information on "status:"" remarks show up everywhere, years later. :)
I believe these are only in AUT-NUM objects that had a new "status:" attribute added and all levels of legacy resource hierarchies that had their "status:" value changed. IIRC when I wrote the implementation plan for this change these "remarks:" attributes were locked in place to prevent accidental removal before anyone read it and then flood Customer Services with questions about the status change. Many AUT-NUM objects are auto-generated and it would be easy to lose these remarks. I think the plan was to unlock these attributes after about 1 year. Another thing that was forgotten after I left...keeping track of things like this was one of the many things someone at the NCC did not know I did :) cheers denis