[ppml] Directory Services - Take 2

[Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com]

>    maintaining servers and updating data are not the same
>    as a supported and maintained protocol... which was 
>    Michaels claim. None of the RIRs, to my knowledge, have
>    made a fundamental change in the whois protocol, they are just
>    tweeking data formats.  It is instructive to go read the actual
>    WHOIS specs.  So no, I'm not confused.

And I am suggesting that ARIN do it's own data tweak by offering
the easy-to-parse option of getting the whois data on port 43
(and via REST) in the XML encapsulation defined by IRIS.

It has been 10 years since I looked at whois protocol documents
but I have always thought of it as a non-protocol protocol.

In any case, my argument is probably more with implementations
that with protocols in the abstract. The rwhois mess is what
I am trying to get rid of.

Now that I know there is an update, I either have to find someone
who hasn't looked at rwhois in 2 years to figure out whether it
is any use and implement it, or I have to do so myself. If this 
were an LDAP server, then one of the people on staff who deal with
LDAP would have told me about the next software upgrade and
made a recommendation about whether or not we should upgrade and
what benefits we might get. That is what I mean by "supported",
not sporadic activity on a mostly dead mailing list.

--Michael Dillon