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[Greg Black]

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Mark Suter wrote:

| rick => Rick Phillips <rickp at universal.net.au>
| greg => Greg Black <gjb at humbug.org.au>
| 
| rick> Pardon my ignorance but what is a "Zone File"
| 
| greg> It's an expression used by people who think the Buggy Internet
| greg> Name Daemon is the only implementation of DNS software.  The
| greg> expression refers to a type of data file used by that software.
| 
| It is the *reference* implementation and the concept of a "zone" is
| explicit in the standards.  Dan Bernstein uses the phrase "traditional
| traditional zone-file format" at the end of the following page.
| 
|     http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/tinydns-data.html

This is true, but even Paul Vixie does not believe that the zone
file format should ever have been standardised -- what happens
on the wire is a legitimate topic for standards, but the data
file format is not (think sql databases, in memory data, etc.).
Here's a recent quote from Vixie on the IETF's namedroppers list
(which should be required reading for people interested in this
topic):

    some known DNS implementations do not parse "zone file
    format" at all, preferring to take all of their zone data in
    the form of RFC2136 dynamic updates.

    i agree with randy (second time this year): standardizing
    zone file format was always silly, and gets sillier every
    year.

If Vixie think like that, I'm happy to agree with him -- and
we're far from being alone on this.

Greg

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