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axfr-clarify's fraudulent claims of consensus

2003-02-14 03:37:48
This ``clarification'' document prohibits several perfectly legitimate,
very widely deployed, AXFR implementation techniques. See my web page
http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/axfr-clarify.html for details. In particular,
this document violates RFC 2119, section 6, in five separate ways.

At least seven people have gone on record as objecting to axfr-clarify:

   Dean Anderson,
   Len Budney,
   Felix von Leitner,
   Kenji Rikitake,
   Aaron Swartz,
   Sam Trenholme (MaraDNS implementor), and
   me (djbdns implementor).

Furthermore, the Yokohama minutes report a WG decision that axfr-clarify
is ``too bind specific''---too specific to BIND 9, to be precise.

Despite this decision and these extensive objections, the WG chairs
declared ``consensus'' for axfr-clarify and sent it to the IESG. Those
claims of consensus were clearly fraudulent: there was no WG discussion
of axfr-clarify in the interim! Subsequent discussions did not resolve
any of the objections.

A review of all of the axfr-clarify discussions in the WG list archive
shows that this document is being pushed primarily by people who have
been paid for BIND work: Mark Andrews, Roy Arends, David Conrad, Danny
Mayer, Jim Reid, Paul Vixie, Brian Wellington, document author Andreas
Gustafsson, and WG chair Gudmundsson.

There are non-BIND people who support the document, notably PowerDNS
implementor Bert Hubert, but my understanding is that Hubert's support
is based entirely on the hope that this document will prevent future
interoperability problems, without regard to the huge redeployment costs
that this document is imposing on the users of existing implementations.

Note that the users attacked by this document include BIND 8 users---who
are no longer represented in the WG by implementors, now that the BIND
implementors are pushing BIND 9. The document's proponents admit that
their ``clarification'' imposes rules disobeyed by BIND 8. My survey
http://cr.yp.to/surveys/dns1.html two months ago showed that 45% of all
.com names were served by BIND 8, while only 23% were served by BIND 9.

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago

P.S. You know what really amazes me about this? In another forum, a few
people, including a former IESG member, are objecting to an incredibly
valuable requirement that software support a universal encoding (UTF-8)
of a universal character set (Unicode). Why? Because this requirement
would force some existing software to change---and these people claim
that the IETF _never_ demands changes from deployed software that
complies with the previous standards.



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