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OpenBSD folklore and share/misc/airport

207 points| mulander | 3 years ago |cambus.net

77 comments

order

trwired|3 years ago

"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.

kmeisthax|3 years ago

"LAX" also is short for "relax", but I don't think it's physically possible to do any such thing within LA city limits.

ornornor|3 years ago

So, the opposite of the emotions experienced when flying and going through airports.

em500|3 years ago

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.)

rdpintqogeogsaa|3 years ago

From what I can tell, at least it's historically inherited. 4.4BSD had a list of airports in the same location.

Its inclusion in 4.4BSD seems a mystery though. No other files on the 4.4BSD distribution seem to reference it. The atc(6) game involves airports, but it doesn't seem to actually open this file, both in 4.4BSD and in OpenBSD.

piker|3 years ago

It could just be a fun Easter egg to keep developers engaged.

roydivision|3 years ago

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

bandrami|3 years ago

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

jl6|3 years ago

I think it’s nice to have a few small standard data sets that you can use in examples, tutorials, man pages and testing.

efortis|3 years ago

Not your everyday caveats section:

https://man.openbsd.org/airport.7#CAVEATS

justusthane|3 years ago

There seems to be a conflict here. The author of the linked article interprets the guideline, "New airports can only be added by OpenBSD developers who have visited an airport and thereby have verified its existence," as only requiring that you have been to the airport, not necessarily having flown from:

> Once again, the more astute reader will not have missed the fact that the rules do not stipulate any flying requirements. Neither did henning@, who not long after airport.7 was committed, added an entry for XFW, (the Airbus factory) which he had visited but not flown from.

Fair enough - he wrote the requirement, after all.

However, the Caveat in the man page seems to contradict this, and indicates that you do have to fly in:

> There are also railway stations with IATA codes. These may not be listed, except if someone landed there by plane and survived to update the file.

mrweasel|3 years ago

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

mike_d|3 years ago

Here is the complete file if you are curious: https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/share/misc/airpor...

There are ~2,000 entries vs ~11,000 assigned IATA airport codes

2143|3 years ago

And my airport is wrong.

My city has two airports which are like 50 km apart. One of them is for military only.

It shows the regular passenger airport IATA code mapped to the military airport name.

I wonder if I can correct it. I'm not a BSD developer at all.

leugim|3 years ago

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."

mulander|3 years ago

Developers are categorized as people with commit access to the project. So contributing patches itself is not enough to add entries to this specific file.

half-kh-hacker|3 years ago

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".

Bad_CRC|3 years ago

I've checked and at least one airport is missing from the list that I've been too.

Tabular-Iceberg|3 years ago

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.

midislack|3 years ago

Mr. Cambus is also the author of the excellent ansiweather script.