Subject: Re: change in bind?
To: NetBSD Networking Technical Discussion List <>
From: Andrew Brown <>
List: tech-net
Date: 11/17/2000 03:07:44
>> > What about bind  Is there any reason not to use it?
>> * it's still not as featureful as v8
>Well, that's a matter of perspective I think.


>The "named" in v9 is *far* more featureful than the one in v8.  It's
>mostly IPv6 compatible for one, and my favourite new feature is "Views".

views are something that i'd really like to play with.  but i don't
have threads.  so yes, v9 has some features we've not seen in a
previous release of bind, but it's also lacking others that previous
releases of bind *do* have.  i'm not trying to put anyone down for the
monumental effort of writing bindv9 from scratch, but it seems to me
that it's just plain not done yet.

>The resolver library in v9 is still very lacking in features though and
>introduces a whole new set of concepts and APIs.

that's not a feature.  :)

>> * it's not as mature as v8
>Given the nature of the code in each I'd say it's more "mature", but not
>more "senior"!  :-)

"mature" as in age, not as in wisdom.  i personally don't feel that
it's had a fair shakedown period yet.

>The v8 code is (though greatly cleaned up from 4.9.x) still a mess of
>overly maintained spaghetti.  The difficulty with outsiders and
>part-time developers such as myself finding the correct fix to the
>recent ZXFR DoS bug is an excellent example of just what kind of state
>it's in.

grep zxfr?  i dunno.  i've been running 8.2.3 betas for a long time now.

>The v9 code is a fresh and new and based on a far more "mature" design.
>The code might be considered as just barely past the "virgin" state, but
>it's already proven to be stable and reliable in several punishing

"mature" in terms of wisdom, perhaps.

>> * it currently requires threads
>The ISC developers build it with unproven-pthreads-0.17 on NetBSD-current.
>So, yes it is a threaded application, but it works just fine with a
>pthreads compatible user-level threading library on NetBSD.

last time i checked, that wasn't part of the base netbsd distribution,
so i don't think any threaded apps will become part of the base
distribution first.

let's see...i can't build my name server because it requires a threads
package that i can't download and install because i need a name server
to get to the ftp site.  catch 22.
