changed attribute proposal and not only

Dear Colleagues,

Please find enclosed the proposal of modification of the changed
attribute that was presented at the RIPE-40 meeting in Prague. However,
another proposal (or rather idea) came up in light of recent discussions
regarding timestamping and cleanup procedures in the RIPE Database. Let
me present you this idea first.

As was pointed by the two proposals there is a need to store and display
status information about an object in the database, such as last update
time, number of references, etc. At the same time in order to be
reliable this information should be automatically generated by the
database software and be outside users' control. Regarding "changed
attribute" proposal people felt that this changes some of the basic
principles of the RIPE Database. Recent Ulf's proposal makes things even
worse since it requires that modification to an object may be caused by
an update of another object.

But in fact these attributes/facilities do not represent an object, but
rather status information about the object. Extending Ulf's analogy with
the Unix FS, they are part of the inode, not the data blocks.

So status information (object metadata) may be stored and displayed
separately from the object itself by, say, using a flag. Much like we
display the contents using cat, but status using ls. And this
information will be used for cleanup procedure, reliable timestamping,
etc.

This will not affect any object template, preserve users' data and add
flexibility to the database.

Something like this:

$ whois -q meta RC1234-RIPE

...

person:	 Referenced Contact
nic-hdl: RC1234-RIPE
...
changed: refcon at somedom.dom 20011005
source:  RIPE

%metainfo:           RC1234-RIPE
%update-time:        2001-10-05 16:50:07
%ref-time:           2001-10-06 09:17:33
%ref-count:          3


Regards,
 
Andrei Robachevsky
DB Group Manager
RIPE NCC