Deprecating BIND 9.18+ on Windows (or making it community improved and supported)

[Richard T.A. Neal]

I would personally be very sad to see the end of BIND for Windows, but I don’t underestimate the challenges the ISC Team has in maintaining it.

Unfortunately I'm a VB.NET hobbyist programmer rather than a C/C++ developer so I can't speak to the usefulness of the following statement, but the latest version of Visual Studio 2019 does appear to support both C11 and C17:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/c11-and-c17-standard-support-arriving-in-msvc/

The installer problem is probably the easiest to fix, but I know it's a very small part of the overall headache. Caphyon offer free use of their Advanced Installer (which is what I use for WinBIND) and that can cope quite happily with installing & uninstalling running services.

The WSL2 option is an interesting one and not something I'd ever considered.

If we end up with option (a), which I suspect is the most likely outcome, I would at least like to offer to be the maintainer of the "BIND 9 on Windows via WSL2" documentation, but only if we can come up with a catchier name 😊

Richard.

-----Original Message-----
From: bind-users <bind-users-bounces at lists.isc.org> On Behalf Of Ondrej Surý
Sent: 29 April 2021 12:36 pm
To: BIND Users <bind-users at lists.isc.org>
Subject: Deprecating BIND 9.18+ on Windows (or making it community improved and supported)

Hi,

we’ve been discussing the /subj for quite some time and we are either thinking about deprecating the BIND 9 on Windows completely or just handing it over to the “community supported” level.

There are couple reasons for the move:

* Neither the VisualStudio 2017 which we use nor VS2019 supports the C11 features we extensively use (stdatomic.h) which makes us to write a horrible horrible shims on top of Windows API
* No BIND 9 developer uses Windows even as secondary platform
* BIND 9 doesn’t compile on Windows 10 nor with VS2019 and that would require extensive work
* Windows now has WSL2 (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10) that can be used to run BIND 9 natively

We think that the resources that would require us to support new Windows and Visual Studio versions would be better spent elsewhere and therefore we would like to deprecate the official support for Windows since BIND 9.18 (the next ESV, to be released in 2022), the Windows support for BIND 9.16 will be kept intact.

Now, there are two options:

a) The support will be completely dropped and the official way to run BIND 9 on Windows would be using WSL2
b) A volunteer will step up and improve the Windows implementation to support newer platforms and make it up to par with POSIX platforms.

1. Let me be absolutely clear here - we are not interested to keep the Windows port just on the life support, that would miss the point. It has been neglected for too long and if we are to keep it, there are several other areas that would need an improvement - the installer, the system integration and the build system would have to be extensively improved as well.

Thanks,
Ondrej
--
Ondřej Surý (He/Him)
ondrej at isc.org