Subject: Re: half time report on wcard

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2003 11:03:09 +1000

> Olaf M. Kolkman writes:
> > alternative text
> 
> The alternative to this particular RFC 2119 violation is to simply omit
> the offending sentence from the document. Wildcards have exactly the
> same semantics whether or not these NXDOMAINs are allowed.
> 
> Why did wcard-clarify stray into NXDOMAIN issues in the first place? Why
> have we still not heard a clear statement of the scope of wcard-clarify?
> I had assumed that this was a matter of poor communication, but now I'm
> getting the feeling that the _authors_ don't have a clear idea of what
> their document was supposed to cover.

	Wildcards are stopped by existing names.

	If you change what names exist you changes what queries
	match the wildcard.  So to clarify wildcards you also have
	to clarify what names exist.

	For the record it is RFC 2535 Section 5.1 that is problematical.

            "The presence of the NXT RR means that no name between its
   owner name and the name in its RDATA area exists and that no other
   types exist under its owner name."

	This fails to account for empty nodes in the tree.

--
Mark Andrews, Internet Software Consortium
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742                 INTERNET: [email-masked]

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---

From: "D. J. Bernstein" <[email-masked]>
Date: 29 Aug 2003 15:41:29 -0000

[email-masked] writes:
> to clarify wildcards you also have to clarify what names exist

Wrong. There are dozens of ways to say

   A wildcard record *.Y applies to a query name X if (1) Y is not equal
   to X and (2) Y is the longest suffix of X for which there are records
   (of any type) whose domain names end with Y. Otherwise *.Y does not
   apply to X. Examples: ...

without giving a screwy definition of ``existence'' and without touching
the semantics of NXDOMAIN.

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago