Re: [DNSOP] New Version Notification for draft-sury-deprecate-obsolete-resource-records-00.txt

[Dick Franks <[e-mail]>]

On 26 March 2018 at 22:36, Paul Vixie <[e-mail]> wrote:


> i've had my symbolics 3640 online quite a bit in the last 30 years, and it
> still makes WKS queries, and i have used WKS responses to control it. the
> software still works as well as it was designed to do, but the vendor is
> long out of business. however, read on.
>

It still works because the end-points understand WKS.  There is no need for
the other nameservers en route to parse the rdata beyond knowing how long
it is.

Ondřej already decided to remove WKS from further consideration.

The focus of this draft is on MB, MG, etc. not the general case of RR
retirement.


please see down-thread where deprecation turns out to be both undesirable
> for the reasons i've given, and additive to developmental complexity since
> there would be _more_ DNS RFC's to read, and suboptimal compared to
> declaring a core subset of DNS technology as "mandatory to implement" and
> simply leaving WKS (and its hypothetical friends) out of that core subset.
>

I fail to see how this changes the number of RFCs to be read.

Nobody has yet defined a core subset; all we have is a camel-load of DNS
technology most of which appears to be "mandatory to implement",
and a mountain of RFCs which are very unlikely to be 100% consistent with
each other.

Expelling one or more items from the "mandatory" set necessarily involves
writing an RFC to add to this mountain, and sometimes obsoleting an old one.

The result is a smaller set of "mandatory to implement" DNS technology.

Repeat this process until nobody can make a good case for further
expulsions;  what remains is the core subset.

Right now, neither you, nor anyone else, can have more than the foggiest
idea what that eventual core subset will look like.

But one thing is certain, if we continue bickering about crap like WKS and
MB, we will make no progress at all.


--
Dick