BIND 9.9.8-S1 Release Notes (What's 'S' stands for?)

[Evan Hunt]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 12:07:22PM +0800, stutiredboy wrote:
> BIND 9.9.8-S1 <https://kb.isc.org/article/AA-01307> was released, but
> what's 'S' stands for?
> 
> I did not found any docs described this.
> 
> Can this version be used on production environment?

The -S suffix is for a "subscription" branch that we make available to
ISC support customers and others on request.  It provides early access,
in a supported and stable form, to features under development that are
of particular interest to large-scale DNS operators.

For example, the "fetchlimit" recursive client rate-limiting features
for addressing recent DDoS attacks, which are in 9.10.3 and 9.9.8, were
released first in the subscription branch while they were still
experimental. Currently it also has negative trust anchor support and
SERVFAIL caching, both slated for 9.11.

Nothing in it is secret or closed-source; it's a just customized version
of the 9.9 branch with certain 9.10 and 9.11 features backported into it,
plus occasionally some experimental features that will be merged to 9.11
after we're satisfied with them.  You can get all the same stuff by cloning
the development branch in our git repository at source.isc.org. (I
can't guarantee not to have broken anything recently, though.)

-- 
Evan Hunt -- each at isc.org
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.