I was thinking about the discussion in the Ops Area today about whether DNS Ops would be more productive if split into ops and ext.
It seems to me that the problem with prioritizing the work in the DNS area is due to a lack of a shared understanding of the requirements and some fundamental disagreement about their relative priority. There are operators who are not convinced of the value of deploying some of the stuff that has been developed (e.g. DNSSEC) and there are developers who are not convinced of the wisdom of some of the things operators want (e.g. EDNS-client-subnet). Generally the operators want to reduce the risk of service impacts, and increase service differentiation so they can find some way to monetize their services. The developers are looking for simplicity, elegance and robustness in the software and the protocol, and to avoid future CVEs. Sometimes these interests overlap, but the relative priorities are rarely in synch. When a new draft is proposed, there is not usually much discussion of the business problem being addressed, and when you look at the technical problems being addressed, often they benefit one party or another in the DNS unevenly. Generally, it isn’t explicitly discussed who the work is ‘for', or how widespread or impactful the ‘problem’ being addressed is. Some documents languish because some people view them as a waste of time. If it was more explicit about who each draft is intended to benefit, it might be easier to ‘take turns’ at the well. More attempts to estimate the scale and impact of the problem being addressed, along with any data that supports that estimate, would help. It does seem sometimes as if there are competing workstreams (enabling DNSSEC, enabling encryption, enabling IPv6 transport, enabling new applications) and if those were more explicit then maybe the WG(s) could attempt to balance them. I don’t seen any long-lasting solution to this. It would be easier to prioritize if the work were divided into operational issues and protocol extensions, but eventually the ops wg could end up with a lot of drafts without implementations, and the ext wg might end up with a lot of protocol extensions that aren’t deployed. _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
