Deprecation notice for BIND 9.18: (root-)delegation-only option

[Ondřej Surý]

Hi,

in line with our deprecation policy, I am notifying the mailing list about our intent
to deprecated the delegation-only and root-delegation-only options.  This is again
adept for expedited deprecation - it will be removed in BIND 9.20 and deprecated
in BIND 9.18.

The (root-)delegation-options were introduced as a countermeasure for the infamous
Site Finder by Verisign[1]. With the controversy around this and introduction of DNSSEC,
the likelihood of this happening is infinitesimal.

If you don't even know what those options does, the TL;DR is that it disables
the non-delegation records for configured domains (TLD), this in turns might
break legitimate TLDs like .de, .fr, .museum and others [2][3].

If you know a legitimate reason to keep those options, please describe the use case
here or in the issue mention below.

This is tracked under https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/bind9/-/issues/3953

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_Finder
2. https://circleid.com/posts/the_name_domain_disrupted_by_site_finder_patch
3. https://www.afnic.fr/en/observatory-and-resources/news/warning-for-bind-and-delegation-only-users/

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

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