Hi Erik -
There's a great button about Usenet -
"Reading Usenet is like drinking from a firehose;
Posting to Usenet is like shouting from a mountaintop;
Archiving Usenet is like saving used toilet tissue."
BGP may be somewhat more important, useful, and the results consumable
in the short-term, but for long-term archiving I think it devolves to
being more interested to researchers and other ubernerds who can use
the libraries and the very valuable data store and service that RIPE
provides (which is appreciated)!
I was thinking more for the medium term "what's normal" that goes
back beyond whatever's in the routing table this second, probably
for a few weeks to months max in most cases.
And I think for actual diagnosis what's needed is a great tool to
ask network and business questions of historic BGP data. That's the
context in which I mention Renesys tools+data.
So I'd say to help the networkers of the world, it's probably more
about tools than history.
Thanks,
Avi