Re: Re: Whois using these ARIN services?? (fwd: Consultation on the Future of ARIN???s Directory Services)

On Tue, Aug 18, 2026 at 07:44:31PM -0400, Shane Ronan via NANOG wrote:
> Your email says "This transition is an important step toward improving
> alignment with established IETF standards.", aligning a new feature to a
> standard doesn't mean shutting down a service that is used in so many ways,
> and expecting users to rely on a service that by your own admission isn't
> the standard in todays OS deployments.
> 
> Wouldn't it make sense to work with the OS community to rdap clients
> ubiquitous before pushing a sunset of whois?

I strongly concur with this.  There are no doubt a LOT of people who
have no idea that any of this happening, but who have built extensive
tooling on top of whois and will not be happy when it all suddenly breaks
(with whatever operational consequences that implies).

What needs to happen is: (1) the developers of every significant whois
client need to be notified (2) they need to be convinced to put a notice
in the client software (3) they need to push a release (4) the release
needs to be picked up by every significant OS distribution (5) the
release needs to be adopted by most of the users those OS distributions.
And then (6) software with equivalent functionality needs to be developed
and tested and deployed and picked up and so on.  Maybe that means
modifying what already exists, maybe it means starting over; but whatever
it is, it needs to be ubiquitous *well before* anyone can even consider
discussing turning off whois.

That's going to take a long time -- years.  But it needs to be done
in order to avoid blindsiding a lot of people who've spent years
(decades) building and relying on whois.

---rsk
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