[db-wg] Proposal: DB object syntax change

On Wed, Feb 05, 2014 at 04:08:38PM +0100, Agoston Horvath wrote:

Dear Agoston

> On 02/05/2014 11:22 AM, Piotr Strzyzewski wrote:
>> This is very good point. However when I tried to reproduce it I have got
>> another error:
>>
>> $ whois 'test !*&[] test'
>>
>> %ERROR:101: no entries found
>>
>> While using https://apps.db.ripe.net/search/query.html search form I
>> have got 'Warning! No objects matched your search criteria.'
>>
>> So, I created the ORGANISATION object with the org-name filled with
>> 'test !*&[] test' (without quotes) and I was able to query it by name as
>> described above.
>
> Thank you for your valuable input.
>
> This restriction has been relaxed during the reimplementation project.
>
> Currently, the restrictions on queries are:
> - maximum 1024 bytes;
> - represents an UTF-8 encoded string.

Good to know. Thanks.

>> I know that documentation is currently outdated. For example
>> <person-name> is defined as not allowing '"Dr", "Prof", "Mv", "Ms",
>> "Mr", no matter whether they end with dot (".") or not', which is not
>> true anymore.
>
> This issue has been fixed and will be part of the upcoming release
> 1.72 of the RIPE Database Software.
>
>> Taking this into account I could imagine that this %ERROR:108: is also
>> outdated or changed in some way. Could this be possibly confirmed by
>> someone from NCC?
>
> We are very sorry that you encountered outdated information. We are
> striving to keep our reference manuals up to date, and will make sure
> this is fixed shortly.

Please excuse me for my scepticism about that.

I have been told about the inconsistency with <person-name> by one of
the NCC staff members on 20th of December 2013. I can imagine that
someone forgot about that piece of documentation during the re-developed
of the software (which was done a year ago as I was told). However, one
month later there have been released the new version of RIPE DB software
and it seems that no-one took care about corecting the documentation.
And, sad to say, it seems from my perspective that it was necessary to
write about that inconsistency loudly at this mailing list to force
someone to take care about that. :(

May I suggest the in-depth inspection of RIPE DB documentation? It seems
that we (the users) cannot be sure how many inconsistecies like those
two are still there.

Best regards,
Piotr

-- 
gucio -> Piotr Strzyżewski
E-mail: Piotr.Strzyzewski at polsl.pl