Deprecating BIND 9.18+ on Windows (or making it community improved and supported)

[Victoria Risk]

> On Jun 2, 2021, at 1:36 PM, Richard T.A. Neal <richard at richardneal.com> wrote:
> 
> Could I ask if a conclusion has been reached regarding this? I know there was quite a bit of chatter in April/May but it's not clear to me whether any conclusions were reached.

We are pretty well decided that we will not support Windows with BIND 9.18.  I see Ondrej replied on this point. 

> 
> If 9.16 is to be the last officially supported Windows version then have you decided yet which features from 9.17 will be  backported into 9.16 and thus receive official support?

We are not going to backport more features to 9.16 after this coming June release, because the priority is stabilizing 9.16.  We want to declare 9.16 to be ‘ESV’ and put it into a more quiescent maintenance mode with the June release so users on 9.11 can migrate to 9.16.

> 
> Easy example: DNS over HTTPS which I believe was initially hoped to be backported into BIND 9.16 around the April/May timeframe this year.

We are probably at this point ready to announce that we have decided NOT to backport DoH to 9.16. We wanted to first check with our support customers, to see what impact this would have on them - but we feel at this point backporting DoH to 9.16 is not going to help stabilize 9.16, and 9.18 is not very far in the future, so we want to wait until 9.18 for a stable version with DoH in it.  

However, we are also discussing, in response to the discussion here, creating a separate image for dig on Windows.  This could be based on 9.17 and therefore could include dig for DoH.  This is TBD but it seems like a reasonable possibility.  

I hope this is a good compromise. 

Vicky