Re: [dnsext] draft-levine-dnsextlang-02 interop w/ rfc3597[bis]

[Tony Finch <[e-mail]>]

Alfred H?nes <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> But what happens if the implementation supporting Ext'lang and
> having been configured with the friendly format for a specific
> "Unknown RRtype" (as listed in RFC 3597) has operational needs
> to _export_ data to a non-upgraded recipient system, in a specific
> operational environment?

My immediate reaction was to say this is a matter for the configuration of
these systems, but then the question is where this configuration should
live and what form it should take.

I have been working on this proposal from the point of view of making
RR editors extensible, which brings up some related issues: whether RRs of
a particular type are human-editable or whether they should normally be
hidden. This mainly applies to DNSSEC records, so the question is whether
this should be hardcoded or supported by a generic mechanism. (There's a
similar question about name compression, for which John has specified a
generic mechanism but which can also be hardcoded according to the rules
in RFC 3597.) The generic mechanism would basically be per-RRtype
qualifiers (c.f. John's per-RDATA-field qualifiers) which could also be
used to say what format to use in master file exports.

Alternatively John's "AXFR or something similar" covers RFC 3597 generic
format master files - you can use the generic format for all records if
you want.

Another question this raises is whether the /etc/rrtypes file should be a
representation of the IANA RR type registry (like /etc/services and
/etc/protocols) or whether it is more system-specific. I have a
half-finished proposal for attaching descriptive text to RDATA fields for
user interfaces, which implies there will at least be per-language
versions, so perhaps it should be thought of as a per-package
configuration file rather than a fairly static part of the OS.

Any opinions on this vague rambling are welcome :-)

Tony.
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