On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 06:06:56PM +0200, denis wrote: Hi
There was a Labs article written some time ago on UTF8 https://labs.ripe.net/Members/kranjbar/internationalisation-of-ripe-database This article put forward the idea of keeping all existing attributes in ASCII (but really meant Latin1) and allowing additional optional attributes for name and contact details in local language. It was back in 2010 during the RIPE61 when I propose person-idn: and other similar attributes. Although I understand your point of view, I believe that the situation has changed through years. So you two are leaning towards allowing UTF8 in some fields, and in other places add an optional new attribute (such as person-idn) if people want to describe more clearly what their actual name is?
If this is the case it would be good if you go over all fields/attributes the database currently knows, and compile a full list of attributes that should receive an idn-sibling or should accept UTF8 instead of whatever they currently accept.
This is what I suggested a few years ago. Someone (maybe a task force?) needs to look at every attribute in every object and choose one of three categories for it:
-Latin1 only: some attributes make no sense in local language, eg status, import -Duplicated: some attributes may need to be available in Latin1 for registry consistency, legal reasons, or simply maintaining a database for the whole region to make use of, but could also be duplicated in local language, eg org-name, abuse-mailbox -UTF8 only: some attributes could be open to any character set, eg remarks, notify (only relevant to maintainer of object)
This requires a bit more preparation work and introducing new attributes, but in the end it allows much more of the database to be opened up to the possibility of UTF8 without restricting any of its value or usage throughout the whole region.
Although I like the idea of setting up the task force, I would like to wait a moment to gather some more ideas and point of views from the community. :)
From the above it looks like the TF should be set up to discuss the implementation details [*], whereas we still do not know if the community at large wants UTF8 in DB at all.
[*] This is in fact the role of the NCC itself, but I believe that we as the community have the mandate to provide some directions here. Piotr -- gucio -> Piotr Strzyżewski E-mail: Piotr.Strzyzewski@polsl.pl