Subject: Re: RRTYPE love, was Re: [dnsext] RRTYPE request: template for ZS record

From: Ted Hardie <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2008 12:17:58 -0800

>I guess the IETF does not want to support standards that it does not
>consider "good". However, in the past this has led to people simply
>ignoring the IETF and doing things their own way, in an undocumented and
>non-interoperable way. Why yes, I *am* thinking of NAT and Skype and P2P
>and SPF and plenty of other things I use daily...
>
>IIRC, the SPF folks put records into TXT records because they had no
>other way to do it. In the midst of the nuclear-hot flames that were
>directed their way when they entered the IETF arena were complaints that
>they were putting structured data into an unstructured field. So, now we
>have the SPF record. (I may not be remembering this perfectly, so
>someone involved with the effort feel free to correct me.)
>
>Based on that history, I think Jim is Doing the Right Thing by trying to
>get the NINFO RR assigned.
>
>
>Regarding whether or not we want DNS to allow "gunk" or "clutter", I
>have to admit I don't share the DNS religion about wanting to keep stuff
>*out* of the DNS. I think there are huge classes of problems that share
>similar properties to things that do work well with DNS-style lookups,
>and given that DNS is arguably the most successful distributed database
>it makes sense that these will appear.

I am generally in favor of getting folks to register new RRs, rather than
simply re-using TXT.  The problem here is that this RR doesn't
actually create an RRTYPE that can be re-used successfully within
the distributed database system you so feelingly describe above.  It has
no structure whatever and it will evidently vary in what sort of content it
contains, potentially from node to node (and realistically from zone to zone).
The use case given (a presence replacement) is missing one key
feature of the deployed systems for presence--the ability to control
who sees what pieces of data.  That makes me suspect it is of limited
utility in replacing any of those, so I am missing the utility here.

Will I fall on my sword, crying out in pain at the cruelty of the
world if this gets allocated?  Nope.  But I think it is under-specified
as described.  As a private use within .tel, it would be fine by me;
but as global RR, I think there needs to be a bit more in the application
about what node info might mean for this to be really useful.

Two cents,
				Ted Hardie

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