Re: [DNSOP] Working Group Last Call on draft-ietf-dnsop-terminology-bis

[Joe Abley <[e-mail]>]

On 3 Jul 2018, at 09:11, Matthew Pounsett <[e-mail]> wrote:

> This is not a complete review of the latest revision.. I'm hoping to get to that in a day or two.   But I've got a question about whether something should be added to the document..
> 
> A question came up in conversation recently about the use of the verb "to publish" in reference to managing DNS data.  It quickly became clear that there may be a common overloading of terms, where the same word means different things to different people.  I wasn't sure this fell into the scope of the terminology document, but I just checked and it does use "publish" in reference to DNS data, so perhaps we should come up with a definition for that.
> 
> To me, publishing DNS data has always meant the generation of the zone and the data it contains, as distinct from distributing the zone (to name servers, possibly though zone transfer) and serving the zone (making it available to be queried on a name server).  To the person I was speaking to, "publishing" meant putting that data on Internet-facing name servers that would answer queries about it.

To me, DNS data is published when it is made available to actors who wish to consume it. That means serving the data (i.e. having servers with the data available to answer queries). I have never heard "publish" used to mean zone generation. A zone, once generated, is not published until it is available for access by others.

If there is actually widespread confusion about this I agree it might make sense to clarify (but if there's widespread difference in usage, the best we can probably do in a non-prescriptive dictionary is describe the conflicting uses, and I have my doubts that that in and of itself will reduce confusion).


Joe