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BIND 10 Development Now Fully Underway
darthcamaro writes "A decade after work first began on version 9 of BIND, the widely deployed open source DNS server, work is now fully underway on its successor, BIND 10. '"One of the goals for BIND 10 is to allow people to customize and extend without too much trouble," Shane Kerr, BIND 10's program manager at the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC), told InternetNews.com.' Sounds good right? Only problem is that it's going to take a bit of time until BIND 10 is actually ready for production — potentially as long as five years!"
Please try not to leave behind useful features. Yes, misfeatures should be abandoned. Sometimes mere obsolescence can move a feature into the misfeature column. However, merely uncommon or obscure != "mis". It requires a pragmatic grownup to detect the difference.
The feature set begins with BIND 9. Too many major revisions of fundamental systems fail to achieve feature parity and long after the "new" is production solid the user base remains stratified into the (neglected) old and the (indifferent) new.
You must know that after the (entirely reasonable) half decade is spent to produce 10 it will take years to migrate the majority of the user base. The justifiably conservative nature of the BIND user base is such that dropped functionality will retard adoption dramatically. Better to provide parity with BIND 9's feature set and remove one excuse to sit on 9 till 2020.
Put it on the list of goals, near the top; "Feature Parity with BIND 9". Make it clear that the user base can take this for granted; if BIND 9 can do it, BIND 10 can do it.
I think you'll find if not a lot more support, at least less resistance. I know you will cut the migration period dramatically.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
I'm saying that if Bernstein had worked a little closer with his user community, many more people would be happily using qmail & djbdns, and there might even be official distros that supported things like TLS & DNSSEC.