[db-wg] will NWI-19 break routing?

denis walker wrote on 30/11/2022 14:26:
> This is an interesting point. I know nothing about bgpq3 or peval
> (even though it has been around since the beginning of time). So I
> just read the documentation on GitHub for them. I never realised this
> feature existed. What you have described here Nick is in effect a
> cross registry dependency. A feature that, as far as the RIPE Database
> is concerned, is undocumented and unsupported. If anyone actually uses
> this feature we have probably just broken it with NWI-19.

Well, heh. This assumes the feature worked to start with.

Cross-registry queries are a fact of life.  It is advisable to specify 
source lists explicitly because otherwise you can end up with all sorts 
of junk in a query (e.g. from RADB which mirrors several well known 
registries).  No-one uses the "-f" option in peval because it's very 
inefficeint, although there are several query frameworks out there which 
do the same sort of thing, namely to pull down a copy of the objects 
they are interested in into a local database, and then run a query from 
there (IXP Manager does this, but it's ixp/route server specific).

Long term, the fix is to use fully qualified object names, i.e. 
source::ASxxxxx:localtoken.  This means updating RPSL, because that 
syntax is currently not legitimate.

Nick