andrew, et al, i see that the discussion continued overnight (i'm here
in beijing) and i hope you can reach a consensus on the matter. here's
my input to the terminology of referrals.
---
According to RFC 1034 section 4.3.2 step 3 substep B, a referral
"happens when we encounter a node with NS RRs marking cuts along the
bottom of a zone" and is constructed by copying "the NS RRs for the
subzone into the authority section of the reply" and putting "whatever
addresses are available into the additional section, using glue RRs
if the addresses are not available from authoritative data or the
cache." By this definition, an answer whose answer section is empty and
whose authority section contains an NS RR set, is only a "referral" if
the NS RRs refer to a subzone of an authority server's zone data.
===
in other words, we need not argue about what a supposedly reasonable
person may be able to understand or misunderstand from the RFC 1034 text
and then rephrase it in some way that may raise or lower the risk of
misunderstanding, or change the results of understanding. all we need to
is quote the actual 1034 text and hope that whatever supposedly
reasonable person reads this document, will come to the same conclusions
they came to when reading 1034.
vixie
_______________________________________________
DNSOP mailing list
DNSOP@ietf.org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop
