Issues with current versions of "doc"...

[Brad Knowles]

Folks,

	I have recently been made aware of some problems with the way 
"doc" may mis-report some errors.  This is an issue for both current 
versions of doc -- 2.1.6 and 2.2.3, for use with BIND 8 and BIND 9 
respectively.  The problem results from the way doc may misinterpret 
the exit codes returned by "dig".  Unfortunately, these errors are in 
code that I have never touched, and I took over responsibility for 
maintaining this tool in 1995.

	To properly fix these errors with all recent versions of dig 
(BIND 8 and above) will require some fairly significant code changes, 
and will reduce somewhat the quality of the error messages that doc 
may be able to report (it would just pass on the RCODE value provided 
by dig, instead of being able to display a somewhat more informative 
error message).


	At this point I am considering my options.  If I decide to go 
ahead and make the code changes, I will most likely also try to 
figure out a way to make the new version compatible with both BIND 8 
and BIND 9.

	However, in that case, this would be the last major release of 
doc -- all future work would be to incorporate all the functionality 
of doc into the DNS debugging tool "dnswalk", which is written in 
Perl.


	Any feedback you may have would be appreciated.


	In the meanwhile, please be aware that doc may return incorrect 
error messages in certain situations.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

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