Ripe change to whois

Hi again,

I am hearing complaints about lack of communication regarding this change in 
the DB.
I would like to point out the following:

We try to announce things as much as possible and are always looking for 
suggestions and ways to improve this.

However, it is and will be impossible to reach all end users (we don't want to 
start spamming, do we?)
We expect to reach people whose interaction with the DB is a bit stronger than 
the occasional end user.
For this we have the mailing lists, the RIPE meetings and the Web site.
Discussions about developments take place in RIPE meetings and mailing lists.
For the people that can't attend RIPE meetings all presentations are available 
at the Web site. This has been so for a some time.
If you are not subscribed to mailing to mailing lists there is not much we can 
do, other than suggest you to subscribe if you rely on the RIPE DB for your 
work. I don't think we should be sending mails with announcements to everyone 
registered in the RIPE DB.

Now, in a previous mail I pointed out a few URLs regarding discussions of the 
referral mechanism.
These, in my view, are hardly 4 light years away (more like a click away) and 
they are at a place where people interested are supposed to look anyway.
Not only this, but discussions have been going on since then and as you can 
see in the archives (publicly available at our web site) details regarding the 
referral mechanism were being discussed in the tld-wg and db-wg lists as 
recently as October 6th 1998 when we were finishing the coding and changes 
could still be easily introduced (as they were).

If people don't want to be subscribed to these lists but the work going on 
there is relevant to them may be it would be a good idea to, at least, make it 
a monthly task to overview the archives and look at the presentations given 
during RIPE meetings. Otherwise, how can we make sure that we reach all 
interested parties without spamming the rest?

So, although we may have room for improvement in getting announcements to a 
wider audience (and we will do our best), in this particular case and the 
people involved, the excuse of not knowing anything about what was going on is 
hardly one at all.

As to why the referral as is implemented makes sense or not, I will leave this 
to the tld community, as the interested parties, to explain.
And, I want to stress this again, everything is open to change if we a 
consensus is reached on what is needed/wanted.

Regards,
Joao

 Alexander Koch <akoch at sgh-net.de> writes:
 * Hello Joao.
 * 
 * [snip]
 * > Well the purpose of the design is to give the user information about the 
 * > parent domain if a certain domain is missing. That's also how the rest of 
 * the 
 * > lookups in the RIPE DB work and is also what you do when looking in the DN
 * S 
 * > for contact info for a domain and you can't find it.
 * 
 * Yes, sure, if I do a lookup for a single IP address I am more than happy
 * to get shown the next inetnum segment.
 * But for domains it fails to make much sense for me. How rare are the
 * cases in which you have to look up the domain object of de?  And if you
 * need to, I cannot help but ask why it is not done by hand.
 * 
 * inetnum and domain objects are rarely mixable when speaking of
 * hierarchical systems... it does not scale equally, I am afraid.
 * 
 * I would like to know some reason for this change by the tld workgroup.
 * 
 * > May be people now see the need for an exact matching option (there is alre
 * ady 
 * > one to disable referral: -R). However if you make this the default behavio
 * ur 
 * > then the purpose of the referral mechanism is defeated.
 * 
 * Let us think the other way round. Make it an whois option.
 * Whatever, whois -L nothing.de works fine enough for me, but
 * it is been all but nice hearing from users something weird
 * happened about domains (and they were not even using the RIPE
 * DB itself). Nicer If I had found out reading the announcement,
 * nothing more.
 * 
 * Regards,
 * Alexander Koch
 * 
 * -- 
 * SGH Internet Division, Alexander Koch, Systems Administration
 * Hannover, Germany, Phone +49 511 909198 0, Fax +49 511 391307
 *