Joe Abley
But the conclusion that it refers to a whois server returning data in the same manner as whois.ripe.net is hardly difficult to reach.
Yes, that is the "obvious" interpretation. But the interpretation I prefered to go with, as being more useful to the direct community of interest was to look at what the RIPE format meant in actual practical terms, ie
that met the goals of the RIPE format first, met the syntactical requirements second and the precise set of fields last.
In my view, blithely using RIPE-049 without considering the intent of the RIPE formats would have been just as non-compliant and less useful than doing what I suggested.
Is that an apology, Don? :)
Absolutely not. I was asked to make a call and I made one. I haven't seen anything new on the subject that makes me want to change my mind. I'm sure that if there was convincing evidence that your interpretation is better than mine that can be accommodated.
resubmission is pointless. Returning a result in a format that is different to every other whois server on the planet is just unhelpful.
A quick survey of the whois servers listed in the whois-servers.net
domain gives 11 whois servers using the RIPE format (or at least
something that looked like it) and 26 that didn't. Three used Rwhois.
Note that about 48 domains (mostly smallish European domains) use RIPE
itself (ie whois.ripe.net). The count above is servers, not domains.
If we're going to count the likelihood of needing to use a RIPE server
to look up a given domain, note that the count above doesn't include the
COM/NET/ORG registrars, pretty much none of whom use the RIPE format.
In short, the claim that "every other whois server on the planet" uses
RIPE, or that the format used is "incompatible with everything else in
the world" is spurious at best. If you want to use "market share" as
the basis for choice, the NSI format would have to be the clear winner.
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.
Andy, with all due respect, the RIPE specification in the document was put there at *your* urging. I hadn't really thought about the implications for the application already being built at the time (since my involvement with the application itself was and is fairly minimal). I can't speak for other Technical Committee members, but I suspect that they hadn't either. The (brief) discussion on the RIPE format was in the September - October timeframe (the draft went out for comment on 12 Oct), well after development was started. It may have been mentioned earlier, but that was the point the word RIPE went into the draft document. The database schema was (IIRC) drawn up as part of the tender response well before that. I'm not aware of any prior policy referring to RIPE. Your paragraph above implies that your insistence on the RIPE format at Technical Committee was a deliberate attempt by a losing bidder to influence the development via a supposedly non-partisan forum. I *hope* this isn't the correct interpretation... As to the database schema itself: it's not my baby. Questions, moving on: Ignoring what Domainz was or wasn't asked to do, do you think the whois server should be a part of the registry interface (which includes the email template) or just a casual query tool? What does it need to do to satisfy users' requirements, and why? -- don --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog