On 27 March 2013, at 23:37, Michael Orlitzky wrote: >> ... >> Like Stroller I've been using net-misc/whois for ever and it does >> what I want, but don't know what the other packages may be able to >> do/do better. I would also be interested to find out why people >> prefer using these. > > They're all identical. The whois protocol is stupid simple
The search I made before posting led me the wikipedia article which mentioned, for example, using thick and thin client models. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whois#Thin_and_thick_lookups One might assume, for example, that a thin client might tend to give more accurate and up-to-date information, but of course there's also the issue that the whois server for the domain might move. Thus the client might need to be updated in a timely manner, too. I have a Gentoo box here that, embarrassingly, hasn't been updated in several years. It seems to sometimes give different results than my laptop does. Stroller.
