[db-wg] country attribute in aut-num

Cynthia Revström wrote on 23/10/2019 20:17:
> I don't quite get what you mean, but I would like a country attribute in 
> the RIPE DB that is equivalent to the value in the delegated file such 
> as the following entry for my ASN.
> 
> ripencc|SE|asn|57782|1|20180925|allocated|e16ee9ac-51d0-4ca5-9ff1-f06d4ef5fd74
> 
> https://ftp.ripe.net/pub/stats/ripencc/delegated-ripencc-extended-latest

the entry in the delegated file shows the country where the legal entity 
which holds the resource is located.

The reason that there's a country code for inetnums is that the internet 
was once small and prefixes tended to be localised to a single country. 
The same was never true for ASNs, which is why the aut-num object 
doesn't have a country field.  I.e. even in the early days of the 
internet, there were plenty of ASNs which spanned several countries.

The inetnum country code is mostly meaningless these days.  Occasionally 
it's used for geolocation, but it's a pretty poor way of working that out.

I'm not sure how meaningful having a country-code for inetnums is. Maybe 
it's a bit meaningful, but it's hard to be sure.  It's even harder for 
aut-nums.  What's your use case btw?

Nick