Re: Two new DNS virtual packages (authoritative-name-server & recursive-name-server)

[Ryan Hiebert <ryan@ryanhiebert.com>]

On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 9:29 AM, Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org> wrote:
>
> If you depend on one of these, what functionality can you rely on having
> "out of the box"? What packages do you expect to benefit from having
> these virtual packages to depend on?

I'm wondering the same thing. In particular, I'm not convinced that a
definition as simple as "it's an authoritative dns server running on
port 53" is a useful enough interface for using as a package
dependancy.

Perhaps, for the authoritative server, if the requirement was
something that allowed the application to update the zones, perhaps
through dynamic updates on port 53.

Or even "has BIND zone files and provides a common command to run to
reload them". The command and files would have to be in a common
location instead of just in the package's /etc/ directory, and the
command would have to be a well-know command, similar to what the mail
server has in the 'sendmail' binary. Which all sounds like a pain to
attempt to standardize, so the already standard dynamic updates over
port 53 is probably better anyway...

Ryan