Re: [DNSOP] A conversational description of sentinel.

[Joe Abley <[e-mail]>]

On 6 Feb 2018, at 11:04, Petr Špaček <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On 6.2.2018 13:22, Tony Finch wrote:
>> A. Schulze <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> 
>>> Yes, "kskroll-sentinel-is-ta-NNNN" is more descriptive and specific.
>>> I also prefer that longer variant.
>> 
>> Yes, more friendly for web searches if someone is wondering about weird
>> queries.
> 
> Bonus points if we can get a number reserved by RFC editor, it would
> allow us to use name like
> test-rfc0000-is-ta-NNNN
> test-rfc0000-not-ta-NNNN
> 
> That would be super awesome.
> 
> Is something like RFC number pre-allocation possible?

You can include instructions to the RFC editor to replace some token in the document by the assigned RFC number. I've done this before in IANA Considerations sections where it is necessary to specify a reference; I've included something like "<this document>" in a table and specified in a note to be removed before publication that that text be replaced by the RFC number.

This seems perfectly possible for this document, but it doesn't help early implementers, and presumably runs the risk of having resolvers deployed that handle different magic sentinel labels depending on when they were released (unless, perhaps, the resolver handling is based on a pattern and not a specific label that has to be matched exactly).

Some other RFC numbers were clearly reserved for specific documents in the past (e.g. see RFC 2821/2, obsoleting RFC 821/2) but perhaps those were special cases.


Joe