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Re: [NANOG] Re: Reasons why BIND isn't being upgraded

  • From: mdevney
  • Date: Fri Feb 02 01:22:56 2001

On Thu, 1 Feb 2001, Derek J. Balling wrote:

> According to RFC1035, it's ALWAYS been bogus. It's just been a bug that
> BIND's parser that accepted the bogus data.
> 
Out of curiosity, why?

Okay, we'll accept that that's the way it is, and I'm not going to rail
about how it shouldn't be, but let's try to understand Mr. Mockapetris'
reasoning in this.  I see this from the RFC (that lists P. Mockapetris as
author, for those who don't place the name):

The format of these files is a sequence of entries.  Entries are
predominantly line-oriented, though parentheses can be used to continue
a list of items across a line boundary, and text literals can contain
CRLF within the text.  

also:

( )             Parentheses are used to group data that crosses a line
                boundary.  In effect, line terminations are not
                recognized within parentheses.


The only clue I can find to his reasoning is:
Because these files are text files several special encodings are
necessary to allow arbitrary data to be loaded.

...which is patently untrue, given that BIND didn't need those special
encodings; it worked just fine without the particular one that we're all
beyond bored of hearing about.  

So: Why?  The fact that pre-8.3 versions of BIND will accept 
@       IN      SOA
                    ( ns.whomever.com

and etc. does not seem like a huge issue to me, though fixing that in
thousands of issues does.  What's the big deal with leaving it
non-compliant?


Matthew Devney