Re: Summary: What to do with expired signatures

["Eric A. Hall" <[e-mail]>]

"Paul V. Mockapetris" wrote:

> So a better way to decide this is just to have the argument about
> whether a text format for zone data is still useful or not, rather than
> whether it is possible.

From my PoV, the two compelling features are portability and directives.
The latter is probably the more important of the two in the current
environment. I think we need more directives, such as a directive that
applies to all entries in a zone (a $DEFAULT or something) so we can set
an MX for all defined and undefined entries. My IDNS draft also called for
a $UTF-8 directive to indicate the charset in use with the zone file. So
at the least, before the zone file format can be deprecated, we would have
to come up with a way to define directives outside of a zone file (a
"directive" RR that was bound to the top of the zone could do this, I
suppose, in a weird sort of way).

I think more work needs to be done on the zone file if it is kept, and I'm
in favor of keeping it. There should be a definition of line formats,
end-of-line markers, etc. So having it in a separate document makes some
sense from this perspective. There is plenty of precedent for having a
data-format specification supplementing a protocol specification (see
[2]822, HTML, etc) so this wouldn't be unheard of.

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/

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