Problem upgrading to 9.18 - important feature being removed

[G.W. Haywood]

Hi there,

On Fri, 1 Mar 2024, Ond?ej Sur? wrote:
> On 26. 2. 2024, at 22:41, Al Whaley wrote:
> 
> > A lot of pain and suffering in this world comes from people being
> > sure they have a 'better idea' and everybody needs to do whatever.
> > This feels a bit like that. ...
> 
> ... ultimately, the developers working on BIND 9 are just a few
> people and it's absolutely reasonable to remove rarely used features
> - especially if there's a replacement ...
> 
> For every decision we make, be it adding a new feature or removing
> an old feature, we do carefully consider the implications ...

And in this case I think it would be unfair to the developers not to
mention that more than two years ago, before actually implementing
this change, the developers did ask for comment and there was debate.
If the OP took a part in that debate I missed it.

8<----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2021 10:02:59 +0200
From: Matthijs Mekking <matthijs at isc.org>
To: bind-users at lists.isc.org
Subject: Deprecating auto-dnssec and inline-signing in 9.18+
Message-ID: <b69d059d-3657-0b68-cb69-766d87a1dec3 at isc.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed

Hi users,

We are planning to deprecate the options 'auto-dnssec' and 
'inline-signing' in BIND 9.18. The reason for this is because 
'dnssec-policy' is the preferred way of maintaining your DNSSEC zone.

Deprecating means that you can still use the options in 9.18, but a 
warning will be logged and it is very likely that the options will be 
removed in BIND 9.20.

We would like to encourage you to change your configurations to 
'dnssec-policy'. See this KB article for migration help:

      https://kb.isc.org/docs/dnssec-key-and-signing-policy

Do you have reasons for keeping 'inline-signing' or 'auto-dnssec' 
configurations? Is there a use case that is not (yet) covered by 
'dnssec-policy'? Any other concerns? Please let us know.
8<----------------------------------------------------------------------

To try to make this more positive, Maybe the lesson here is that if
you're using BIND other than because it happened to come with your
distro, then it's probably a good idea to keep an eye on this list to
monitor the plans for development.  If it says that in the ARM, which
IMO it probably should, I missed that too.

-- 

73,
Ged.