Re: [dnsext] [spfbis] Obsoleting SPF RRTYPE

["Murray S. Kucherawy" <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 11:05 PM, David Conrad <[e-mail]> wrote:

> > So how much energy are the DNS experts going to put into cleaning up
> their house while demanding the mail people clean up theirs?
>
> So, this is about revenge because it used to be hard to get RRtypes?
>

Did I really come across as that petty?

No, what I'm saying is that the way things were ten years ago pushed the
SPF community to the place it's in now, ugly as it is.  SPF, in the
interim, has become very widely deployed.  Suddenly now we have a few
voices from the ivory tower asserting that the same community needs to go
out and re-do things the way they should have been done in the first place,
now that we finally have a somewhat more reasonable perspective, even
though some of the vestiges of ten years ago are in fact still around.  My
reaction to that is "You can't be serious."  That doesn't sound like
revenge at all to me, just pragmatism.


> > The deployed SPF base probably won't give a damn if the IETF suddenly
> releases an RFC that exclaims "Everybody migrate to type 99!"
>
> Yep.  This gets into projections about the future.  If SPF has topped out,
> it simply doesn't matter.  If SPF is going to continue to grow, then it
> probably does matter.
>

I think it's much closer to the former.


> The point is that it isn't just fine.  It does have operational impacts,
> from potentially increased fragmentation/fallback to TCP to increased
> complexity in TXT RR parsers that have to distinguish between the myriad of
> crap that's residing at the zone apex TXT RR, etc.  Of course, most of
> these negative impacts are hidden to the folks who are putting the TXT RRs
> in the zone, so it's all good, right?
>
> > Thus, I maintain that we take our licks on this one and just take steps
> to ensure that nobody follows this path again.
>
> And how do you propose that exactly, particularly given the precedent set
> by SPFBIS?
>

Someone else (Joe, I think) has already referred to other RFCs that talk
about things like IAB advice about how [not] to put application data into
the DNS.  Seems to me this is a perfectly good subject for another such
project.  One may counter that by saying nobody will pay attention to such
a document, but I submit that it's our primary mechanism for making sure
mistakes aren't re-made, so that's the tool we have to use or not use.

If we do the opposite and somehow compel SPFBIS to favour type 99 over TXT,
then I still think we'll be shouting that to an audience that will think
we're nuts and simply go about their business.

-MSK