[NANOG] Re: Reasons why BIND isn't being upgraded

Fri Feb 2 03:30:41 UTC 2001

Pim van Riezen (pi at vuurwerk.nl) said, on [010201 18:58]:
> 
> Parsing human input isn't hard, you know. Robustness doesn't come from
> being anal. If there's a bogus entry, reject the entry not the entire
> zone. The rejection as such doesn't even classify as bogosity, it's the
> 
I fail to understand this. You seem to suggest that a name server should
reject the SOA record, but accept and attempt to serve the zone.
Precisely how would that work?

> I also seriously counter your claim that having this bracket on the next
> line is in any way bogus. It's visually superior to the now enforced
> option of having it on the same line. There is nothing in the parser not
> to understand it. Spreading data across lines is commonly accepted in a
> lot of configuration languages and bind has been among this in all
> versions I previously ran. Why is that now suddenly bogus?
> 
Because rfc1035 has always defined it as bogus. The parenthesis is, as
you are now no doubt aware, a line continuation character:

5.1. Format

The format of these files is a sequence of entries.  Entries are
predominantly line-oriented, though parentheses can be used to continue
a list of items across a line boundary, and text literals can contain
CRLF within the text.  Any combination of tabs and spaces act as a
delimiter between the separate items that make up an entry.  The end of
any line in the master file can end with a comment.  The comment starts
with a ";" (semicolon).

-P.