"Export dbm" program

Geert Jan, Cengiz, Martin,

Well, we seem to have massive concensus that folks aren't much worried
about 24-hour stale data for analysis.   Geert Jan's comment that he
didn't think Ripe had ever received a commplaint or request about the
data was the kind of feedback I had been looking for.

> As far as I know, we never received a request for the data as you suggest.
> Have you?

We know that NASA, ESNet, and PREPNet (at least) parsed PRDB reports as
part of their own config file generating process.  When we turned off
some of the more obscure reports in Summer '93, we got various
complaints from across the world.  In each case we were able to give
the folks new ways to get the data.  The original Spires PRDB dates
back to 1988 (and we took great pains to make Informix support
everything that the Spires system did), so some of the "older" folks on
the net probably got used to ftp'ing and grepping files before the
whois service existed, and they still haven't retrained their fingers.
As for the folks who use registries for config-file generators, they
may still have need for queries like "I want to interpret the policy word
`ANY' as a list of all net numbers registered in the IRR.  Please return
all those nets".  Fortunately, Rick's radbserver allows this request--
I don't know how you'd achieve that with just whoisd.  

Since we, too, have the ftp respository on a different machine than the
database itself (making the change less than totally trivial), I guess
we won't pursue this either.

--Dale



-------- Logged at  Wed Dec 14 17:59:50 MET 1994  ---------