Dear madam, sir, mythical creature, or cleverly-designed AI,

On Thursday, 2012-06-21 17:49:01 -0400,
"lists@help..." <lists@help...> wrote:
>  > "Phase one: Implementing the policy" will include a new whois
>  > switch
> being introduced
>
> This will break existing software that makes whois queries for IP's.  

The time for hoping for consistent query behavior or answers from Whois
was over about 20 years ago, sorry. Since that time there have been at
least 4 efforts to "fix" or replace Whois:

* Whois++
* RWhois
* IRIS
* weirds (currently on-going)

The first three all failed to get any reasonable traction, for various
reasons. The weirds working group at the IETF is proceeding apace,
including participation from ARIN and the RIPE NCC at least, so perhaps
there is a certain amount of hope. (WARNING: The IETF working group
does not have a complete summary of all issues open to it in a way that
is accessible to any casual observer, so you may be offended and
outraged by it.)

As far as the RIPE Whois service specifically... the query and answer
formats have evolved continuously over the past 20+ years, without
severe breakage. 2011-06 is much less radical than previous changes to
the RIPE Database, so we can safely say that this is not a major
concern.

Cheers,

--
Shane