Feature or bug on $ORIGIN directive

[Sebastian Castro]

While i was checking if $ORIGIN directive requires a dot on the name
provided, I found this curious behavior that I don't want to rush to tag
it as bug or feature.

If you have a zone like this

$TTL 86400
@       86400   IN  SOA ( father.example.net. educator.example.net.
2007000006 900 300 604800 3600 )
       86400   IN  NS  ns1.example.net.
       86400   IN  NS  ns2.example.net.
; Delegations
$ORIGIN net.com
taranaki.example.net.  86400   IN  NS  ns1.taranaki
taranaki.example.net.  86400   IN  NS  ns2.taranaki


and you do this query to the nameserver with that zone

dig ns taranaki.example.net @localhost +norec

; <<>> DiG 9.6.1-P1 <<>> ns taranaki.example.net @localhost +norec
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 4937
;; flags: qr ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;taranaki.example.net.		IN	NS

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
taranaki.example.net.	86400	IN	NS	ns1.taranaki.net.com.example.net.
taranaki.example.net.	86400	IN	NS	ns2.taranaki.net.com.example.net.

;; Query time: 6 msec
;; SERVER: ::1#53(::1)
;; WHEN: Wed Oct 14 15:57:15 2009
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 91


the nameservers for taranaki.example.net are not FQDN, so the $ORIGIN is
added. But because the addition of the $ORIGIN doesn't make them FQDN,
the default $ORIGIN for the zone is added as well.

This could be seen as a feature in the case of someone defining a zone
that will contains records for subdomains, or a bug if someone meant to
make them FQDN by using $ORIGIN and forgot the dot.


Any thoughts?


Kind Regards
Sebastian Castro