Reckhard, Tobias writes:
The latter page says, "This Internet-Draft was not published as an RFC."
Right. The BIND company is trying to get this ``clarification''
published as a ``Proposed Standard'' RFC.
These decisions are supposed to be made by working-group consensus, then
reviewed by the IESG. The DNSEXT chairs have sent this document to the
IESG, claiming that the document has DNSEXT consensus.
In fact, at the last DNSEXT meeting, the working group decided _against_
publishing this document. (``Too BIND-specific,'' the minutes say.) The
only discussions since then have been secret discussions between the
BIND company and the DNSEXT chairs. (The chairs let slip on 2002.08.19
that they were acting on the basis of behind-the-scenes discussions.)
In legitimate standards organizations, there's no way for anyone to
misrepresent the will of the group. All actions are confirmed by votes.
In contrast, in the IETF, chairs have tremendous power to promote their
favorite documents. They can declare ``consensus'' whenever they want.
A tremendous burden is then placed on people who object, even if those
people are the majority of the working group!
The history in http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/axfr-clarify.html shows that the
DNSEXT chairs unilaterally pushed this document forward on 2001.03.13,
2001.04.04, 2001.06.22, and now 2002.11.13. People who object to the
document have had to speak up again and again and again.
---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago