Notice of plan to deprecate map zone file format

[Victoria Risk]

Greetings bind-users,

The `map` zone file format was introduced in BIND 9.10. https://bind9.readthedocs.io/en/v9_16_20/reference.html?highlight=map%20zone#additional-file-formats <https://bind9.readthedocs.io/en/v9_16_20/reference.html?highlight=map%20zone#additional-file-formats>

At the time, this format significantly sped up a named restart, which could take several hours in some situations. This new file format is very complicated, and maintaining it has proven difficult. Meanwhile, the performance advantage versus the `raw` format, or the default text files, has decreased as we have made other improvements in performance. 

We would like to deprecate the `map` zone file format in future branches of BIND. The proposal is to deprecate the feature in the 9.16 branch, (users will see a warning when this feature is used but it will still work through the end of the 9.16 branch), and to disable the feature in 9.20.0 (it will no longer work in this and subsequent versions). 

Per our policy on deprecating named options, we are notifying the user mailing list.  You are welcome now to howl in protest or point out something we haven’t considered.  ;-)

Regards,

Vicky Risk
Product Manager
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.isc.org/pipermail/bind-users/attachments/20210909/3691a8bc/attachment.htm>