At 12:46 PM 5/31/00 +1200, Don Stokes wrote:
The short answer is that the RIPE-049 format simply doesn't match the data held by Domainz. Your own whois demonstrates this by burying a bunch of info in the remarks: field; frankly, I wouldn't want to have anything but free-form comments in a remarks: field; as such I'd consider the RIPE format essentially unparseable for the fields that appear in the DRS format that aren't specified by RIPE-049.
There's a strange kind of circular argument here. The RIPE format whois (and in some sense this was a mandate for a RIPE format database) was advocated/mandated by ISOCNZ as a matter of policy for Domainz long before the work commenced on the implementation of the current system. So much so that the bid that Netlink submitted for the replacement system advocated the RIPE format. I think it's a pretty spurious argument to say the RIPE format doesn't match Domainz's requirements when the Domainz data structure was formulated after the event (and to the untrained eye it seems as though this was deliberate so that the monopoly held by Domainz would be hard to break). Certainly any request from ISOCNZ and the industry for this format has been studiously ignored on repeated occasions. My concern in all this is that we're very large numbers of dollars down the track - I've heard figures of $700,000 and more - and we have a format that's incompatible with everything else in the world --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog