RE: Question on 7.0.0.0/8

[<michael.dillon () bt com>]

> Come on, let's not get carried away.
>
> The problem with the IANA file is that "reserved" is ambiguous and  
> there are other things in there that get in the way of easy parsing.  
> This is easy enough to fix. Geoff Huston wrote a draft 
> suggesting how  
> to do it.
>
> Whois, LDAP and other stuff like that only makes things worse 
> because  
> this requires you to walk through the data rather than have it  
> available in a nice, easy to handle text file.

Yes, let's not get carried away. The data is already available in a
nice, easy to handle text file for those that simply want to look at a
simple listing. But for those who NEED to parse it with automated
systems and who NEED to know when things have changed, an IANA whois
server is a better solution. Whois has things like Regdate, Updated, and
a Comment field which just don't fit in a simple text file.

And let's also not get carried away with writing Internet drafts to tell
IANA how to fix a problem that they really should be INDEPENDENTLY
fixing because it is the right thing to do. I would like to see IANA
respond to complaints, but I would not like to see IANA sit on their
hands and wait until the IETF discusses and passes an RFC to define what
IANA  should be doing.

Also, my comments about RESTful API, XML-RPC and LDAP were directed at
ARIN, not at IANA. 

--Michael Dillon