Subject: Re: SRV resolver API?

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 10:41:32 -0500

----- Original Message Follows -----
> 
> > I'd like to suggest that part of the problem -- at least on the Unix
> > side -- is that there isn't a standardized resolver API for SRV. 
> > The IPv6 effort came up with getaddrinfo() and friends in rfc2553;
> > its gone into POSIX as well.  Why haven't we standardized a resolver
> > API for SRV?
> 
> more broadly than that, a full dns client-side api is needed.  we
> drafted one a couple of years ago but couldn't find the funding for
> it.  c and c++ programmers should have the same high level access to
> the dns protocol that perl programmers have (through the excellent
> Net::DNS module).
> 

Paul, is the funding needed for the work to get the standardization
pushed
through the various standards bodies or for the implementation?

Danny

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---

From: Paul Vixie <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 16:51:27 +0000

> pushed through the various standards bodies or for the implementation?

depends on which standards body you mean.  the advanced bsd api rfc for
ipv6 seems to have resulted, for the first time ever, in portability of
socket-api applications.  the posix socket api wasn't able to achieve
this in the ipv4 days -- there were way more #ifdef's then than now.

i believe two things.  first, in the power of implementation.  the glibc
project has created a defacto standard that's a superset of ansi/posix,
and the original bsd socket api (by which i intend to include things like
gethostbyname) and the original bsd dns api (by which i mean to include
things like res_query()) have been wildly successful, widely emulated
on non-unix platforms, and generally acceptable.

second, in the danger of the power of implementation.  more reviewers and
more creative minds would have caught a lot of errors and omissions early
on which are still painful today because implementation was so powerful.

while ietf's charter is all about on-the-wire protocols and formats, it
did good work with the advanced bsd api rfc for ipv6, and i think that
doing an advanced dns api rfc would be just as successful.

isc's original funding request to the "bind vendors" on this topic 
included both an openly-developed api, and an open-source implementation
of it.