On Wed, 29 Oct 2008, John Levine wrote:
I find it hard to see this as anything other than a bug in whatever
scripts they're using to create their DNS records. The DNS has counts
for all variable length fields, so there's never a need to escape
anything in the bits on the wire.
People who know the protocol would obviously agree, but I'm not certain
everyone pasting these things into zone files has knowledge like that.
They're more likely to follow scripts or examples they find online.
But in fact it's even less of a problem than I feared. Some local testing
shows the following two TXT records in a regular bind zone file are
semantically equivalent in the current implementation:
IN TXT "foo;bar"
IN TXT "foo\;bar"
The RFCs about zone files are unfortunately ambiguous on the backslash.
They only specify that backslash can be used to escape a quotation mark
inside a quoted string. They don't say what backslash means in any other
context.
Why "dig" decided to start rendering semi-colons as escaped in their
output, when they're not explicitly so in the zone file or on the wire, is
currently a mystery to me. I'm just concerned that it will confuse some
people tasked with deployment somewhere down the line.
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