Please note - my position may or may not be similar to the one of Sprint.
So what we're seeing here is Sprints refusal to follow standards simply because they are too lazy(?) to fix things.
Fix what? traceroutes that started to put dotted quads where names once were?
On the other note - MHO is it was a Bad Idea to put these checks into the resolver library. No objections towards having it as an option in the code for primary zones in name servers, though.
I think I'm going to have to ask you to lay down the calculator and grab the wall on this one. Sprints failure to follow specifications does't mean that we shouldn't point them out and call them on it.
OK, I hear you, thank you very much.
Anyone's willing to give you a little leeway, I'll grant that, but face it, you've been (and are continuing to) breaking RFC and its certainly not the fault of the BIND team. They're doing their best to create something that works and from what you just said, Sprint is doing their best to tell them 'go to hell, we don't care about the rest of the internet'. This smacks of a Sean Doran'ism where Sprint is an almighty god figure and nobody else matters.
We do care about providing the best service possible to our customers (which includes the best possible interaction with all the other Internet). The naming scheme for the interfaces is a part of our internal automatisation, and we are not changing our internal automatisation if we think it works for our purpose of providing the best possible service. A couple of words about the bind team: 1) I greatly appreciate their effort as it's one of the canonical blocks of the Internet software, and we use their product (not without our own patches, of course) very extensively; 2) I wish the design of the canonical blocks of the Internet software was steered more by the pedantical adherence to the RFCs, and less by the desire to patch bugs in other software - canonical or otherwise. And, of course, please accept my sincerest apologies to those, whose day is ruined every time they see dotted quads instead of those funny sl-foo-bar/baz interface names.
[-] Brett L. Hawn (blh @ nol dot net) [-]
Now shall we move to some other list, please? Dima