Dear Denis,
On 16 Dec 2025, at 03:57, denis walker <ripedenis@gmail.com> wrote:
Colleagues
I agree with closing NWI-17. It would be a nightmare to implement and I also believe it would put a considerable workload onto the RIPE NCC to operate. There is a lot of hidden complexity in this simple suggestion. I won't go into any detail unless anyone pushes for this NWI to be continued.
NWI-2 is a different story. As David pointed out at RIPE 91, I wrote the spec for introducing historical queries when I was at the NCC. At the time this was a feature that had been talked about over coffee and beers at meetings. There had been no great discussion on mailing lists. The RIPE NCC decided to introduce this feature and see if it was useful. We didn't want to invest a huge amount of time and effort in this. So I added this arbitrary limitation of only giving history of the current instance of an object. The way the data model works, when you delete and re-create an object it becomes a different instance. You can then have multiple versions of multiple instances of an object. So this limitation made the code easier to write. We got it up and running and over the years it has proved to be quite useful to many database users.
We could look at removing this arbitrary limit in the same way. It has been talked about in the corridors at meetings. As with the original concept, there hasn't been any great discussion on mailing lists. So my suggestion to the RIPE NCC is to just do it. We have this ongoing debate about whether some changes should be an NWI or PDP. Some changes perhaps don't even need to be debated. The RIPE NCC introduced this arbitrary limitation without any discussion. They can just remove it now as a software update. I am sure that I said at the time that I had added this arbitrary limitation and that it could be removed if historical queries proved to be a useful feature. So I think we have already made the argument for removing it.
cheers denis
At RIPE 84, Maria Stafyla from the RIPE NCC Legal team presented on NWI-2 : https://ripe84.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/121-Legal-Update-NW... The Legal analysis was that if personal data is part of a deleted object, there must be a purpose justifying the need to still display it in the RIPE Database, and there is no such justification in the current purposes as listed in the Terms and Conditions : https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/db/support/documentation/terms/ For this reason, Maria asked the community to define the requirements for NWI-2 and what is in scope. If there is still a requirement from the community to provide deleted information of resources holders in the RIPE database, then we need to clarify these requirements. Regards Ed Shryane RIPE NCC