A policy for removing named.conf options.

[Jim Reid]

> On 13 Jun 2019, at 14:18, Warren Kumari <warren at kumari.net> wrote:
> 
>> A configuration option that is candidate for removal will be deprecated
>> first.  During this phase the option will still work, but we will be
>> communicating to users that the option is going to be removed soon. A
>> user that has deprecated options configured will see warnings in their
>> logs and needs to take action to get rid of those log messages.
> 
> Many many people don't look at their logs -- could named also print
> stuff to (stdout, stderr) when starting?

That probably won’t work Warren. The people that don’t/won't read their logs are unlikely to read named’s stdout or stderr. Assuming they knew were these went. Besides, those file descriptors are usually closed or get redirected to /dev/null whenever a daemon gets started from init or its equivalents:

% lsof -p 11450
COMMAND     PID   USER   FD     TYPE             DEVICE SIZE/OFF      NODE NAME
...
named-9.1 11450 nobody    0u    VCHR               0,25      0t0        25 /dev/null
named-9.1 11450 nobody    1u    VCHR               0,25      0t0        25 /dev/null
named-9.1 11450 nobody    2u    VCHR               0,25      0t0        25 /dev/null

How about having named-checkconf alert people to config file elements that are dead or about to die? This could then be documented in the README or INSTALL files and the ARM. I know, I know - nobody reads them either. :-(

Failing to start the name server because of a deprecated element in named.conf would certainly get someone's attention. Effective, but perhaps a bit extreme. :-)