Ripe change to whois

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 DNS 
> 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 already 
> one to disable referral: -R). However if you make this the default behaviour 
> 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