Users Want *Seamless* Solutions, Not Patchwork (was Re: Users want solutions, not buzzwords)

[Kevin Darcy]

Brad Knowles wrote:

> At 7:34 PM -0400 7/25/01, Kevin Darcy wrote:
>
> >>  bind-users
> >>  Discussions among users of BIND. It is also available as the newsgroup
> >>  comp.protocols.dns.bind. This is a good place to discuss problems that
> >>  you are having setting up BIND, or getting it to do what you want.
> >
> >  I've never taken the "This is a good place ..." language to mean that the
> >  list was *limited* to those topics.
>
>         Not entirely limited to these topics, but certainly advocacy of
> another program is wholly and totally inappropriate.
>
> >                                       Anything which is reasonably
> >likely to be
> >  of interest to users (or potential users, I would say) of BIND, would appear
> >  to be fair game here.
>
>         If you want to talk about specific features or mis-features, ways
> of using or mis-using BIND, etc... then I would have no problem with
> that.

Dan's ease-of-use table *does* go into specifics of what he perceives as
shortcomings of various aspects of BIND configuration, right down to the specific
keystrokes he believes is necessary to accomplish various tasks using BIND.
Although I think the table gives a distorted picture of BIND, I find it somewhat
useful as a starting point for discussing exactly what the
strengths/weakness/limits of BIND's features are.

> However, getting into advocacy of another program is not
> appropriate -- regardless of what His Almighty Omniscient Omnipresent
> Omnipotent Dan-ness may seem to think.

But you can't evaluate BIND in a vacuum. If someone says "BIND feature X is
cool" or "BIND feature Y sucks", then this elicits the question "compared to
*what*?". Well, djbdns is one "what" against which BIND can be compared. And it
wouldn't be fair to do that comparison all by myself, given my approximately
decade of intense involvement with BIND configuration versus my
virtually-non-existent knowledge of djbdns configuration. A fair comparison
requires someone with an equivalent or at least roughly-equivalent level of
familiarity with djbdns. I think Dan probably meets the minimum qualifications in
that regard :-)


- Kevin