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

[Matthew Pounsett <[e-mail]>]

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.

However, using such a broad definition of "publishing" seems, to me, to
introduce confusion in that it removes a clear distinction between the
steps of generating data, distributing those data, and then making them
available to be queried.  To draw a comparison, one might look to the steps
of writing, publishing, distributing, and selling a book (although I'm not
sure how the first two would map differently to publishing DNS data.. they
seem like the same step to me in this context).