Notice of plan to deprecate map zone file format

[Timothe Litt]

On 10-Sep-21 13:11, Evan Hunt wrote:
> Recently a critical bug was discovered in which map files that were
> generated by a previous version of BIND caused a crash in newer versions.
> It took over a month for anybody to report the bug to us, which suggests
> that the number of people willing to put up with such a finicky format
> must be pretty small. (Or that the people who use it aren't keeping up with
> regular software updates, I guess.)

Thanks for the history/data.

In my experience, the bigger the operator (of any system), the more
slowly they are likely to update it.

A month doesn't seem like a long time - everyone wants to be second to
update (except for CVEs, and even there I don't rush to update for CVEs
related to features I don't use).

> it would be nice not to have to worry about map files when it came to
> maintaining feature parity.)

I wouldn't worry all that much about blowing away old map files with a
version upgrade; they're pretty well documented as a cache, not a
primary format.  And you supply the tools to convert to a stable format.

In fact, were you to come up with a data structure and loading scheme
that made raw as fast as map, you could treat "map" as a hint that a
user values speed over size & portability - and just write raw format
instead.  Until the pendulum swings again.


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