Re: DNS servers
Craig Sanders writes:
> On Fri, Nov 22, 2002 at 12:22:43AM -0200, Adriano Nagelschmidt Rodrigues wrote:
> > About the tinydns data format that you dislike so much ("ugly,
> > difficult to read and a PITA to work with"), let me remember you that
> > traditional UNIX /etc/{passwd,group,shadow} files have a similiar
> > format. This is so also because it makes them a _lot_ easier to be
> > manipulated programmatically.
Oops. s/remember/remind/. Sorry.
> /etc/{passwd,group,shadow} have fixed formats, with fields separated by
> colons. parsing them is as easy as splitting on : characters.
This is also true for the tinydns data format, no? It just has more than one
type of record, each with a fixed number of fields.
That is, in addition, you have to look at the first character to know the
type.
> tinydns has a variable number of fields per line, and uses "%" and "="
> and "@" etc to indicate what type of data is being represented (which is
> fine for programs, but certainly doesn't qualify as "human readable").
The record chars may be considered mnemonic: @ for MX, = for A, PTR,
etc ;-)
> they're not the same thing at all. not even superficially close.
Same underlying UNIX philosophy.
> in any case, nobody pretends that passwd,group, or shadow files are
> primarily designed to be edited by humans. they can be in an emergency,
> but the primary method has always been to use programs such as adduser,
> deluser, chfn, etc.
Precisely. Why do you think this reasoning doesn't apply to DNS data?
You also get to choose the interface you want to use, be it a text editor, web
cgi, the bundled tools or even a script that creates tinydns data from bind
zone files (eg using DNS::ZoneParse from CPAN).
Regards,
--
Adriano
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