Hello there,
the recent revision of network delegations I recently undertook in a commit, only rather large address chunks were updated. Now I learned about ERX, Early Registration Transfer, where the first few years of this century witnessed a large scale splitting, and ensuing transfer to new authorities, of the old B-class and C-class IP-ranges. I was made aware of this matter for APNIC. I need advice as to the desirability to implement these in our file `whois/ip_del_list'. It would mean entering a lot of 16-bit ranges down to 24-bit ranges, shattered rather arbitrarily over the old classes. Clearly, this would improve the usability of our WHOIS client, but also increase its size due to hardcoded delegation data. I noticed the issue when my client included in OpenIndiana provided me with more relevant answers than did our client. What is the size increase in rough numbers? I'm not sure it is worth to worry about it unless we are talking about several thousands of kilobytes. Another question: The client found in Solaris offers a program switch directing the query to Route Arbiter Database (whois.radb.net) where large amounts of information on numeric networks are easily available. Would you welcome a similar addition to our client? If you think it is useful, I see why not. I can't really say I use whois that much to have a good grasp on what would be a useful feature or not.
