I know you aren't favorable to doing the work internally to ISC, but has anyone scoped out the effort involved in backporting this to BIND 8?
it's under consideration now. bind8 is not a priority for the bind forum, and isc would rather put it in feature-freeze, but we're looking into it. bind9's internals make "delegation-only" easy to implement. bind8's internals are pretty twisty.
I'm interested in that as well (BIND 9 as a recursive server on Tru64 doesn't work in my experience),
works fine here. bind9 is what f-root runs, and also all of our recursive servers, some of which are tru64. try it, you'll like it.
but I would suggest any discussion about that move over to the BIND list or the USENET gateway comp.protocols.dns.bind.
agreed, other than to clear up the above in the same forum where it was heard. -- Paul Vixie