Hi Marco,
The problem that I believe implementing this will solve is one of updates.
For example, today I wanted to check an entry in the .bar domain; I am
using a downstream distribution (in my case Linux Mint 17.1), and it has
whois 5.1.1
That version does not know that .bar is a domain, and where it should be
queried. That version is from Jan 2014, and you updated the file in Apr
2014 (
https://github.com/rfc1036/whois/commit/171705cbde06ef350f2e34ae76070a41a681c35f
).
It will probably be a year or more, until the first downstream (Ubuntu in
this case) and then the next downstream (Linux Mint) get an updated version
that does know about the domain.
Which is a shame, since you've put in a lot of time and effort maintaining
whois. A naive user would believe that the program is at fault.
If you implemented this new feature (checking whois.iana.org for
referrals), my immediate problem will not be solved but it will mean that
for future LTS distributions where updates are incorporated only after a
tedious amount of time then whois will "Just Work" with newly delegated
domains.
I still think you should consult your internal database first, just have
IANA's whois as a fallback.
Hope that clears up why I think this would be a nice-to-have feature.
Thanks,
Anand
On 5 January 2015 at 14:07, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> On Jan 05, Anand Kumria wrote:
>
> > The IANA whois server (whois.iana.org) will issue referrals to all known
> > domains, whether they are existing gTLDs, ccTLDs or the newer
> > (whois.nic.).
> I am not sure of which problem this would solve, can you elaborate?
> There is no point in using this as the default since my own database has
> an higher quality than the IANA one.
>
> --
> ciao,
> Marco
>
