I just started using the hostip data set with a Postgres database which looked (and still does) like the perfect tool for the job due to its network data type support that makes CIDR block searches trivial. To also make it efficient, I wrote a small Perl script that coalesces neighboring /24 nets, thus reducing the whole data set from ~8.4 M network->country mappings (I don't need city information so this is all I'm using ATM) to some 250 K. A bzipped database dump is just 1 MB, as compared to 20 MB for the CSV, so I was wondering if this (converted to CSV as well instead of a Postgres-specific dump) couldn't be used as a distribution format? It's obvious you shouldn't rsync a 120 MB file daily but with a mere meg it wouldn't kill your servers.
Expanding the file to the full redundancy of the current format so as not to break compatibility with other tools is simple
