Re: [DNSOP] why classes are useless, was New Version Notification for draft-sullivan-dns-class-useless-01.txt

["John Levine" <[e-mail]>]

>what's stopping a second $class from working is STD 13, half of which 
>says that zones and rrsets span classes, and half of which says that 
>each class has its own zone cut hierarchy. we would have to decide, and 
>revise.

If we spent a year arguing about what STD 13 should really have said
about classes, there's two places we could end up:

1) There's one name tree, and classes provide variant meanings
   of some RRTYPEs.

b) Every class has a separate name tree.

In the first case, classes buy you nothing.  If you want RRTYPEs that
mean something different from existing ones, define some new ones.
It's not like we're in any danger of running out of RRTYPE code
points.  (We can argue about how hard it really is to implement new
RRTYPEs, but I doubt the answer would change much with or without
classes.)

In the latter case, classes still buy you nothing.  Set up some root
servers for your new name tree and you're done.  I suppose one might
argue that gives an unfair advantage to the IN class and we should
instead have the existing roots serve different answers to queries for
different classes, but good luck with that.

Deprecate this vermiform appendix and be done with it.

R's,
John