[em500]

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.)

[mrweasel]

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

[Beltalowda]

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.

[bodyfour]

Some things like the ASCII table have been there (or rather in the original location of /usr/pub) since near the dawn of UNIX itself: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/8cf2a84...

(Also available as "man ascii" from almost as long ago https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc... )

OpenBSD seems to like collecting extra items though

[skrtskrt]

The phone codes must be terribly out of date and inaccurate those are so hard to maintain even with paid official data sources

[dontbenebby]

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

[bawolff]

I think mac os also has the list of birthstones

[rdpintqogeogsaa]

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.

[fanf2]

It goes back a bit further than that, to 4.3BSD-Reno https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.3BSD-Reno/sh...

The previous release, 4.3BSD-Tahoe, did not have /usr/share

[piker]

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

[brynet]

History is so quickly forgotten: https://www.openbsd.org/hackathons.html

.. also: https://www.openbsd.org/events.html

[em500]

Your reply doesn't seem to answer my question at all. I opened both links, searched for "airport" and "IATA" and nothing relevant came up.

[brynet]

Well then here's a few more keywords for you. 'jet-lag', 'travel'.

Hackathons tentatively take place in airport lounges.

[bqmjjx0kac]

Non-sequitur?

I'm reading "hackathons may occur in airports, therefore OpenBSD should maintain a list of all airport codes."

Suppose the list didn't already exist, how would you justify adding it?

[roydivision]

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

[widjit]

It is an official list: a list of airports visited by OpenBSD developers.

It's just a bit of culture, don't worry about it so much.

[dontbenebby]

So if you were doing a more serious program you wouldn't use this?

I'm not familiar with BSD but when I was using Kali if I was using a share it was to feed into something else, classic example being wordlists fed into hydra[1] or something.

[1] https://sectools.org/tool/hydra/

[hoppyhoppy2]

Because that would require trusting some third party that claims (accurately? deceptively? who knows) that those airports exist. As maintainers of and contributors to a security-focused OS, OpenBSD devs want to verify the existence of each airport themselves before deciding it's fit for inclusion.

[em500]

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.

[Doctor_Fegg]

Official lists are very often not permissively licensed (or openly at all).

[bandrami]

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

[jl6]

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