Happy holidays from ISC!
ISC is fortunate to have staff members in so many different countries around the world: our software development benefits from all the different perspectives - and we benefit personally!
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The BIND 9.16 branch is approaching EOL. This branch was first published on March 6th, 2020, four years ago. For some time now, we have been adding only critical fixes to BIND 9.16, but that will end with the April release.
We encourage users running 9.16 or (gasp) 9.11, to upgrade to 9.18 at this time.
The 9.18 branch has consistently out-performed the 9.16 branch, and we are confident that it is more stable than 9.16. One of our support engineers has prepared a knowledgebase article on updating from 9.16 to 9.18 which may be useful to you as you plan your migration. We also attempt to track the major feature differences from branch to branch in the BIND Significant Features matrix, although this is far less detailed than the release notes. Please note that BIND 9.16 was the last branch that included support for the Windows(tm) operating system.
For an overview of our release plan, we maintain another knowledgebase article. This was updated earlier this month, to move the start of future new stable branches from Q1 to Q2. The problem with starting a new stable branch in Q1 is, after the long holiday quiet period, we always have a number of important fixes and changes we need to release before we can start a new stable branch. We are currently projecting that our next stable branch, BIND 9.20, will be released late in Q2.
For your convenience, we also maintain our planned EOL dates listed next to each software release on https://www.isc.org/download/. Updates such as this one are typically posted on the bind-announce mailing list, which is open to all.