Re: wcard discussions in Minneapolis

[Rob Austein <sra@isc.org>]

At Tue, 29 Mar 2005 10:43:05 +0200, Olaf Kolkman wrote:
> 
> Just to make sure we do not stall on this question I propose that if
> there is no further discussion on the item we follow the recomendation
> of the design meeting i.e. outlawing the behavior.

Sorry, but I have to stand in the way on this one.

We are talking about pathologically broken data that never could have
meant anything useful under the rules we have now.  The design team
proposed protocol changes (in particular, to DNSSEC) in order to nail
down the uselessness of these pathological cases.  This does not seem
helpful.  Don't we have enough whacky special cases yet?  Do we really
need to add still more special cases, change existing protocol and
implmentation, spend years debugging this nonsense, all for the sake
of having this form of pathologically broken data produce exactly the
same useless and incomprehensible behavior in all implementations?

Last time I checked, dividing by zero didn't work either.

I propose that we just leave this broken stuff broken.  The result of
putting an NS or DNAME RR at a wildcard name is undefined.  It might
just sit there and drool.  It might do something entertaining.  It
might cause the penguin on top of your telly to explode.  It might
spell the end of civilization as we know it.  You know, "undefined".

Garbage in, garbage out.

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