If one want an example of changing type code look at SMTP. SMTP went from address records to MX records. The change took about 2 decades before people where happy to not publish A records for mail addresses. It takes time to get software that supports the change deployed. There is no one now that would be worried about publishing a MX record without an A record at the same name but people where still worried about the turn of the century.
A to AAAA is still in transition. It’s progressing well but had people saying for a long time that the transition is never going to happen. Today just about every piece of software supports looking up both A and AAAA records but it has taken nearly 30 years to get to this state. SPF was never given enough time for the transition to happen. The software that looked up SPF records was just starting to be deployed when people complained that it had failed. This is the same software that took MX well over a decade to be deployed. As for the FUD that was thrown around about the two types not working together. One just had to publish both types until there was critical mass of the SPF software deployed. Setting a sunset date for the TXT version would have been a good idea as would have been publishing all the examples using SPF rather than TXT. We had a agreement to continue the transition to TYPE99 regardless of whether experiment succeeded or failed but that got reneged on. There NEVER WAS an experiment to see if transition of types could work. SPF is an example of how to not manage a type transition, nothing more than that. Mark > On 9 Mar 2025, at 07:32, Tim Wicinski <tjw.i...@gmail.com> wrote: > > (speaking as a chair) > > Thanks for keeping this discussion civil and reasonable. I can attest that > not only folks "new" to DNS can forget things along the way. > Just a few weeks ago Mr Levine bonked me on the head (literally) for > forgetting RFC6686 "Resolution of the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and > Sender ID Experiments" > existed. > > Also, unless the RR Type request requires resolver processing, the expert > review team has been very reasonable to work with. > > tim > > On Sat, Mar 8, 2025 at 1:14 PM John R Levine <jo...@taugh.com> wrote: > On Fri, 7 Mar 2025, Victor Zhou wrote: > > John - Yes, I am aware of RFCs 8552 and 8553 and the IANA registry for DNS > > Underscore Names that 8552 creates. Our intention is *not* to compete with > > or replace the underscore naming scheme, but rather to provide a > > complementary approach specifically focused on progressive adoption of new > > RR types. > > But we have forty years of history that tells us that "progressive > adoption of new RR types" does not happen. Either a new RR is defined and > people use it, or we repurpose TXT. There is nothing in between. > > The SPF record is a good example of this. SPF was designed and > implemented using TXT records. (They should have used a _spf prefix but > by the time it got to the IETF, it was widely deployed and too late to > change.) When RFC 4408 was nearly done, a handful of DNS people in the > IETF insisted that we use a a different RRTYPE and wouldn't let us publish > the RFC unless we added the SPF type. We knew nobody would use it but we > shrugged our shoulders and added it. To nobody's surprise, people kept > using the TXT record and the SPF record was eventually abandoned. > > I encourage you to find something else to work on, because this one is a > dead end. > > Regards, > John Levine, jo...@taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY > Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly > > _______________________________________________ > DNSOP mailing list -- dnsop@ietf.org > To unsubscribe send an email to dnsop-le...@ietf.org > _______________________________________________ > DNSOP mailing list -- dnsop@ietf.org > To unsubscribe send an email to dnsop-le...@ietf.org -- Mark Andrews, ISC 1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742 INTERNET: ma...@isc.org _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list -- dnsop@ietf.org To unsubscribe send an email to dnsop-le...@ietf.org
