Re: [mif] Server selection document is "band-aid" not solution

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 02:47:45AM +0000, [e-mail] wrote:

> The DNS server selection document indeed assumes applications do not
> provide preference on what "context" they want to use - because
> generally applications just don't know that information, and we want
> to avoid bothering users with network selection UI dialogs.

No, the reason applications don't have that interface is because we
told them that the DNS is a unified name space.  That's its design.
(This is part of Olafur's point, if I read him correctly.)

As a matter of fact, because of what people have done with the DNS, it
is _not_ a unified name space, and you will indeed get different
answers on different interfaces.  Moreover, vendors (who perhaps ought
to have known better) have attempted to fix that by adding curious
different ways of not experiencing too much pain whenever this
situation arises.

The reason that we need the server selection document, therefore, is
that we want people to do this hackery in a way that causes the least
harm.  We shouldn't mistake this attempt to do the least bad thing as
itself good.

You're quite right, however, that we don't want to bother users with a
server selection UI for these cases, but I disagree that it's because
it would be "bothering" them.  I'd be happy to bother them if I
thought there to be the remotest hope they could answer the question
we'd have to ask.  They just want to be able to go where they want to
go, and if the idea of the right network context were the sort of
thing that was coherent to most users, we probably wouldn't need to be
doing these sorts of work-arounds for private DNS names in the first
place.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[e-mail]