Hi David,
David R. Conrad writes :
As APNIC uses the RIPE database software, I thought I might intrude here for a second and throw in my two yen.
Names likes this will be rejected in the next release of the updating code. Names should consist of at least two parts, not counting abbreviated parts/titles.
As I have mentioned in the past, there are people who have only one name. If you decide to do this, please make a compile or run-time configuration option that will defeat this syntax check.
Don't worry. I heard already about your concerns. It is supported: # NROFNAMES # # minimal number of components that a name should consist of NROFNAMES 2
WRT "fuzzy" / wildcard matches - it would make the RIPE-DB software more user friendly (and maybe more attractive for deployment by other registries) to provide for (implicit/explicit) regexp or partial key matches.
To what end? Is the purpose of the database registration information lookup or a more general white pages service? I' would suggest the former and leave the latter to the WHOIS++/LDAP/X.500 crowd.
In general, I agree with this principle: The whois servers should be fast & reliable. We should only support queries that the users (eg.: networking communitity) needs. We better don't support lookup methods that are more usefull for the 'sales & marketing' department. However, this doesn't mean that we shouldn't be user-friendly. David K.