[db-wg] Draft Minutes of the RIPE 52 DB-WG meeting

On Apr 28, Nigel Titley <nigel.titley at uk.easynet.net> wrote:

> E. "51.8 RIPE NCC" (return irt: by default) revisited (RIPE NCC)

> 	It was eventually decided that the RIPE NCC client software would add the -c flag
> 	to default queries, but that default behaviour would remain as it is.

This is very annoying. We had a clear consensus on the mailing list and
NCC even started implementing the needed server changes, but now the
proposal has been nullified with a motivation like "it would take too
long to be implemented".

Because of the following reasons I believe that the new proposal is, at
best, useless:
- the official RIPE whois client is irrelevant because it's probably[1]
  used by only a tiny part of the users base, which very probably is
  clueful enough to not need that irt records are forced down on them
- not being able to rely on support from clients and users was the
  reason for the original proposal, and the new proposal fails the
  initial requirement

If NCC really cannot do anything better (but so far I do not believe
that it has clearly explained why) then please use your resources to
improve the WWW interface instead, which is used much more by
inexperienced users.
Creating and *prominently* advertising a new query form which would
automatically process abuse-mailbox attributes and irt records (and fall
back to admin-c/tech-c) for the purpose of finding an abuse contact
would be more useful than changing the default settings of the C whois
client.


[1] I now have another reason to ask RIPE NCC to publish some
    statistics about the client info specified with the -V flag.

-- 
ciao,
Marco
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