Bug#505736: Geo::IPfree country data is outdated and incorrect

[Damyan Ivanov]

Hi,

We got the following bug report about Geo-IPfree in the Debian bug 
tracker. It would be nice if you can comment on it.

The ifull bug log and the attachments it talks about are at 
http://bugs.debian.org/505736

Brian Cassidy also offered to take ofer the maintenance of Geo-IPfree 
and take care to update its database. Please say if this is fine with 
you.

Thank you,
    Damyan
    Debian Perl Group

----- Forwarded message from Claus Herwig <c.herwig at checon.de> -----

Subject: Bug#505736: Geo::IPfree country data is outdated and incorrect
Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:05:36 +0100
From: Claus Herwig <c.herwig at checon.de>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US;
	rv:1.8.1.17) Gecko/20080829 SeaMonkey/1.1.12
To: submit <submit at bugs.debian.org>
Reply-To: Claus Herwig <c.herwig at checon.de>, 505736 at bugs.debian.org

Package: libgeo-ipfree-perl
Version: 0.2-6
Severity: normal
Tags: patch

The country data file provided with Geo::IPfree
/usr/share/perl5/Geo/ipscountry.dat
is extremly outdated and incorrect.

So please include an uptodate country data file.

Attached you'll find three files:
- webgeo2ipct.pl converts an freely available uptodate GPL'ed country  
database to Geo::IPfree's ipscountry.dat.
You can get the required source database file anytime from
http://software77.net/cgi-bin/ip-country/geo-ip.pl
- README.database is the licence file that comes with this source database
- ipscountry.dat is an uptodate generated file as of 14/11/2008


My suggestion would be to replace the file in /usr/share/perl5/Geo with  
the uptodate version and provide the old version together with the  
conversion script and licence file in  
/usr/share/doc/libgeo-ipfree-perl/examples.

I consider this a bug and not a wishlist item because
- packaged ipscountry.dat (27/3/2003) is over five years old and contains 
approx. 30'000 records compared to an uptodate file with about 90'000 
records.
- For roughly 30% of all allocated IPv4 address ranges in the world the  
allocation was changed in the last five years.
- libgeo-ipfree-perl is suggested by packages like awstats. If you use it 
for logfile analysis you get seriously wrong data. For example: After  
doing some tests for myself I'd estimate Geo::IPfree gets it wrong for  
about 50-80% of web traffic in Western Europe. This IMHO renders the  
package quite useless in its current state.

----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
dam            JabberID: dam at jabber.minus273.org
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