[9002] in SIPB bug reports
Re: various rolodex database nitpicking
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Mon Oct 6 23:01:54 2003
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2003 23:01:39 -0400
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
To: "Joel N. Weber II" <nemo@MIT.EDU>
Cc: bug-sipb@MIT.EDU, yonah@MIT.EDU, kenta@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <E1A6i0S-0007Af-00@xanthine.gratuitous.org>
Joel N. Weber II <nemo@MIT.EDU> wrote on Mon, 6 Oct 2003
at 22:55:24 -0400 in <E1A6i0S-0007Af-00@xanthine.gratuitous.org>:
> > ``rolodex mycroft'' gets you the gnu office. that stopped being The
> > Right Thing in about the fall of 1997.
>
> I don't think it's implicitly wrong.
>
> Why is it right for that to be there?
Because people know that "rolodex mycroft" will get you the GNU
office, and you should not break it for them without cause.
> I'm not aware that you've ever spent significant time in the GNU
> office, so I'm wondering what evidence you have to support what you
> are arguing.
I don't claim that Charles is there. I merely claim that it's
not implicitly wrong for "rolodex mycroft" to return the gnu office.
> This is normal when the entry is listed in both the rolodex library
> file and the NANPA database.
>
> Is that useful behavior, though? Was listing it in the rolodex
> library something that was done before the NANPA database was used?
I dunno. Short of combining the data, which would seem a pain,
it seems to be well-entrenched behavior.
> I also notice that if I say ``rolodex 765-463-0000'' (which is the
> exchange my parents in Indiana are in), I don't get anything. It
> appears that the NANPA database that's there doesn't cover the entire
> US.
That's correct, only the EN* series.
> > (One also wonders if tying that into google might be clever, or
> > something. Or searching the athena finger info.)
>
> No. Rolodex should stay local, without external network dependencies.
>
> I don't disagree that it might be useful to have a tool which is
> strictly local. But it seems like a tool that would search all of the
> databases one might care about might be useful. For example, getting
> the google data and the NANPA data with a single command would be kind
> of neat.
Perhaps it would be useful. But rolodex users should not be subject to
their data going out to the Wider Internet and being sent to Google
and have to trust that Google uses their query data wisely.
It should be a different tool, IMO.
--jhawk
