"whois -h tools at xxx.net" ?

  > "Dale S. Johnson" <dsj at merit.edu> writes:
  >   1) Does this service look useful to anyone else?

Creeping featurism!

  >   2) Is there a clean way to tie this into the RIPE-distribution whoisd?
  >      - Anything with a space in it ("aggis 35/8") is a special program?
  >           [But some queries can potentially allow spaces, no?]

No.
whois daniel karrenberg
is a perfectly legal query doing what you expect.

  >      - Anything in a list of key names is a special program?  
  >           [But then this name space can overlap with, e.g., maintainer
  >            or community names and cause conflicts]

Not a good idea either.

  >      - Anything sent to a totally separate whois server (whois -h
  >          tools.XXXX.net) is a separate program.  [Counter-intuitive;
  > 	 folks will always be making mistakes].  [Or:  make it
  > 
  > 		 finger "aggis 35/8"@finger.XXX.net   
  > 	?]

Re-inventing rsh ...?

  > (Our version looks for the first token on /usr/local/whois.bin;  if it
  > is there, run that as a program passing the rest of the string as 
  > parameters).

Namespace problem.

  >   3) Are folks willing to have the front-end of this be part of the 
  > standard IRR software?

I am not convinced.

Daniel



-------- Logged at  Tue Mar 28 21:49:12 MET DST 1995  ---------