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OpenBSD folklore and share/misc/airport

cambus.net

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Re: OpenBSD folklore and share/misc/airport

#31

Post by Beltalowda »

mrweasel wrote: post #29
em500 wrote: post #10

Ok, I'll ask the obvious. Why is OpenBSD trying to maintain a list of IATA airport codes? (And before you ask why not, try to think of some answers yourself first. I can come up with a few drawbacks, though I'm nowhere close to a subject expert.)

There's also share/misc/birthtoken with a list of birth stones and flowers. That's actually much more weird than a list of airport codes. https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/share/misc/birthtoken

Also a list of operator precedence, various phone area codes (country & local), an ASCII table.

I guess it's just a "list of databases that was useful/fun to someone, at some point". Harder to "just get it from the internet" back in the 80s.

Re: OpenBSD folklore and share/misc/airport

#32

Post by em500 »

roydivision wrote: post #12
em500 wrote: post #10

Ok, I'll ask the obvious. Why is OpenBSD trying to maintain a list of IATA airport codes? (And before you ask why not, try to think of some answers yourself first. I can come up with a few drawbacks, though I'm nowhere close to a subject expert.)

And whatever the valid reason, why isn’t it an import of some official list?

The official list is payware: https://www.iata.org/en/publications/store/airline-coding-di...

Alternatives are to scrape some other website (who presumably paid IATA for the data) or Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_airports_by_IATA_and_...) which may or may not be more complete/accurate than OpenBSD's own crowdsourced list.

Re: OpenBSD folklore and share/misc/airport

#33

Post by skrtskrt »

Beltalowda wrote: post #31
mrweasel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also share/misc/birthtoken with a list of birth stones and flowers. That's actually much more weird than a list of airport codes. https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/share/misc/birthtoken

Also a list of operator precedence, various phone area codes (country & local), an ASCII table. I guess it's just a "list of databases that was useful/fun to someone, at some point". Harder to "just get it from the internet" back in the 80s.

The phone codes must be terribly out of date and inaccurate those are so hard to maintain even with paid official data sources

Re: OpenBSD folklore and share/misc/airport

#34

Post by bandrami »

em500 wrote: post #10

Ok, I'll ask the obvious. Why is OpenBSD trying to maintain a list of IATA airport codes? (And before you ask why not, try to think of some answers yourself first. I can come up with a few drawbacks, though I'm nowhere close to a subject expert.)

Many weather apps use IATA codes; I've looked them up in that file before for that.

Re: OpenBSD folklore and share/misc/airport

#35

Post by mauvehaus »

mjg59 wrote: post #25
mrweasel wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which makes you wonder why some railway stations would have a IATA code.

Up until very recently United had codeshares with Amtrak on the north-east corridor, and could even rebook onto Amtrak in the event of flight disruption. Lufthansa still offers connections to and from Deutsche Bahn on the same ticket ( https://www.lufthansa.com/tr/en/rail-and-fly )

I hope to never see the day that air traffic is so disrupted that getting rebooked on Amtrak seems like a better option. For a variety of reasons, Amtrak's adherence to schedules is abysmal.

Has anybody here had this happen? 9-11 is the last occasion I could imagine where this could possibly be a win.

Re: OpenBSD folklore and share/misc/airport

#36

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

I thought this was going to be about https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#43 where the author claims that Richard Stallman made a scene and had to be removed from a plane from Washington DC to New Orleans.

It sounds like a severe enough accusation that there should be some corroborating evidence.

Re: OpenBSD folklore and share/misc/airport

#37

Post by half-kh-hacker »

leugim wrote: post #8

I visited 4 airports that aren't in the list. Do you think I can add them to the list? Never committed before to OpenBSD so I do not know if I compute as a "OpenBSD developers" in "New airports can only be added by OpenBSD developers who have visited an airport and thereby have verified its existence."

I think maybe this could be workable if an OpenBSD developer were to visit you in person to verify your existence and thereby transitively verify the existence of the claimed "visited airport".

Re: OpenBSD folklore and share/misc/airport

#38

Post by trwired »

"One can say anything about Lublin airport, but they sure do consider IATA codes are serious business. The tone was set right from the parking lot entrance."

The reason Lublin's IATA code is so prominently exposed is because the word "luz" in Polish means - among others - the state of being relaxed, chilled out. Just a bit of marketing on the city's part.

Re: OpenBSD folklore and share/misc/airport

#39

Post by rst »

mauvehaus wrote: post #35
mjg59 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up until very recently United had codeshares with Amtrak on the north-east corridor, and could even rebook onto Amtrak in the event of flight disruption. Lufthansa still offers connections to and from Deutsche Bahn on the same ticket ( https://www.lufthansa.com/tr/en/rail-and-fly )

I hope to never see the day that air traffic is so disrupted that getting rebooked on Amtrak seems like a better option. For a variety of reasons, Amtrak's adherence to schedules is abysmal. Has anybody here had this happen? 9-11 is the last occasion I could imagine where this could possibly be a win.

Amtrak's adherence to schedules varies by line -- the problem on many of them is getting trapped behind freight trains, but on the Northeast Corridor specifically, Amtrak itself owns most of the track, and the rest is shared with other passenger rail operations (various commuter rail), so they're about as reliable as airlines (which themselves are... not infrequently disrupted by weather).

Re: OpenBSD folklore and share/misc/airport

#40

Post by dontbenebby »

mrweasel wrote: post #29
em500 wrote: post #10

Ok, I'll ask the obvious. Why is OpenBSD trying to maintain a list of IATA airport codes? (And before you ask why not, try to think of some answers yourself first. I can come up with a few drawbacks, though I'm nowhere close to a subject expert.)

There's also share/misc/birthtoken with a list of birth stones and flowers. That's actually much more weird than a list of airport codes. https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/share/misc/birthtoken

I was always more of a Debian person but you're making me want to switch, this is some old internet style fun.
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