At 2:53 PM -0400 6/9/04, Andrew Newton wrote:
In order to reach consensus on the issue of wildcards, we would like
working group participants to answer the following questions.
Please read through them first before responding.
1) During the MARID interim meeting, Ted Hardie suggested a dual
record type approach whereby TXT would be used in servers incapable
of supporting a new record type, but more capable servers would use
a new record type (specifically defined for MARID). Do you feel
this is a workable solution? (Reference Margaret Olson's description
here: http://www.imc.org/ietf-mxcomp/mail-archive/msg01512.html).
To be a bit clearer here, the group had already agreed that the SPF
syntax might
be a fallback to an XML-based syntax standardized in the group. It seemed
fairly obvious with that deployment strategy that the SPF record would not
move out of TXT into a special-purpose RR; I suggested that the XML syntax
record might also be present in the TXT record (in an ascii-only form, to
deal with the limitations of some handlers of TXT records) while we deployed
the XML syntax record.
Note that in the interim the timeline for full deployment of the new record
was discussed as 5-10 years, and there was explicit discussion of making
parallel queries for both records during that period (presumably forcing
the protocol or deployment docs to discuss what happens if you get
both back and they disagree--already required by a similar possibility
of getting a MARID record back and an SPF syntax record back).
To re-quote Marshall's now very apropos quote "If not us, who?
And If not now, when?"
Providing a transition strategy that enables us to use TXT as a short/medium
term strategy makes sense to me; relying on it for all time seems
like a collapse into sub-typing where the TXT RR structure doesn't permit
or encourage it. To put it bluntly, in my opinion it is very bad engineering.
Speaking personally,
regards,
Ted Hardie