Subject: Re: DNSEXT WGLC: Unknown types support

From: Erik Nordmark <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2002 15:35:54 +0200 (CEST)

The document uses rather inexact language about "case sensitive" and "lower
case" - it would be quite helpful to point out that the DNS servers notion
of "case" is limited to octets that are in the ASCII range.
Otherwise folks will continue to discuss what case sensitive means
for octet values >128.

I don't know whether this belongs or not, but it would seem
useful to somewhere specify the behavior of unknown classes.
Would that make sense in this document? Or in a separate "unknown-classes"
document? 
The reason I think this would be useful is because there are people that
are contemplating introducing a new class to the DNS, and I don't know
if we currently know how things behave and how we'd like things to behave
when they see an unknown class.

  Erik

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From: [email-masked] (Andreas Gustafsson)
Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2002 10:58:58 -0700 (PDT)

[ post by non-subscriber.  with the massive amount of spam, it is easy to
  miss and therefore delete mis-posts.  so fix subscription addresses! ]

> Otherwise folks will continue to discuss what case sensitive means

The language of the unknown-rrs draft is no more inexact than that of
STD0013, or of other RFCs that reference the case insensitivity, e.g.,
RFC2535.  You have a valid criticism of STD0013, but turning that into
a criticism of the unknown-rrs draft is inappropriate and unfair.

> when they see an unknown class.

The draft already defines the behavior of unknown classes with
respect to the draft's subject matter of known versus unknown RDATA
formats:

  In the case of a type whose RDATA format is class specific, an RR is
  considered to be of unknown type when the RDATA format for that
  combination of type and class is not known.

There are several other aspects of DNS classes that are poorly
specified or insufficiently explained in STD0013 and that would be of
interest to those contemplating the introduction new classes, but
those are unrelated to the questions of known versus unknown RDATA
formats that this draft is trying to address, and they apply equally
to known and unknown classes.  Those would best be addressed in a
separate draft (named "classes", not "unknown-classes").
-- 
Andreas Gustafsson, [email-masked]