New Versions of BIND Are Now Available, Including the First Version of BIND 9.9-ESV

[Michael McNally]

BIND 9.9.3, BIND 9.8.5, and BIND 9.6-ESV-R9 have been released
and are available to be downloaded from the ISC ftp site or
from http://www.isc.org/downloads/all

Full release announcements have been posted to the
bind-announce list (visit https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo
to manage your subscriptions to ISC mailing lists or to visit
the list archives.)

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       BIND 9.9-ESV and a New Naming Convention for ESVs

In addition to being the most feature-filled version of BIND
to date, BIND 9.9.3 is also the first version in the BIND 9.9-ESV
series.  With the introduction of 9.9-ESV, ISC is changing our
previous naming system for Extended Support Versions of BIND 9.

Previously when a series was designated an extended support
version of BIND, the naming of individual releases in that series
was changed to include the designation string "ESV".
For example, prior to 9.9-ESV, the previous ESV series was 9.6-ESV.
In the BIND 9.6 release series, the versions that became the ESV
branch were given names as follows:

    9.6.1, 9.6.2, 9.6-ESV, 9.6-ESV-R1, ..., 9.6-ESV-R9

BIND 9.9-ESV is not going to continue this naming convention.
Instead, BIND 9.9 series releases will be incremented normally
(maintenance releases will increment the minor revision number,
security fixes will add a suffix indicating an out-of-cycle
patch, e.g. -P1, -P2, etc.)  However, despite the omission of
"ESV" from the version number, the BIND 9.9-ESV series will
receive the same commitment to extended support lifetime that
other ESV versions have received -- you can plan a migration
to 9.9-ESV and have confidence that the code line will be
supported for several years to come.

The other difference in naming convention for 9.9-ESV applies
to the identification string reported by the server (for example
in response to named -V)  Versions of 9.9-ESV will include
the string "(Extended Support Version)" in their identification
string, e.g. "BIND 9.9.3 (Extended Support Version"

We hope that this will not cause unnecessary confusion for BIND
users but after receiving feedback from customers and package
maintainers it appeared that revising the naming convention
for ESV releases was our best choice to address the concerns
that some had expressed.