Subject: another question about draft-...-records-06

From: David Blacka <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2004 10:48:50 -0500

I noticed that records-06, section 6.3 "Canonical RR Ordering Within An 
RRset" says:

   For purposes of DNS security, RRs with the same owner name, class,
   and type are sorted by RDATA: first by RDATA length, shortest to
   longest, then by the canonical form of the RDATA itself in the case
   of length equality, treating the RDATA portion of the canonical form
   of each RR as a left justified unsigned octet sequence.  The absence
   of an octet sorts before a zero octet.

Which seems to contradict rfc 2535, which says:

8.3 Canonical RR Ordering Within An RRset

   Within any particular owner name and type, RRs are sorted by RDATA as
   a left justified unsigned octet sequence where the absence of an
   octet sorts before the zero octet.

When and why did this change?

I know that previous interpretations of 2535 excluded ordering the RDATA by 
length first, because I had code that did this by mistake, and it did not 
interoperate.

-- 
David Blacka    <[email-masked]> 
Sr. Engineer    Verisign Applied Research

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From: Ólafur Gudmundsson/DNSEXT co-chair <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 22:57:58 -0500

>When and why did this change?

Good catch,

dnssec-records-04 is the first version with this wording.
the text before that was not clear and this was an attempt to fix that.
You are right, this is a protocol change, thus this text needs to
be revised to comply to 2535.

>length first, because I had code that did this by mistake, and it did not

I wonder how many of the implementations had picked up on this detail
and coded it ?

         Olafur

         Olafur