Debian/Ubuntu: Why was the service renamed from bind9 to named?

Mark Andrews marka at isc.org
Mon Jul 20 23:05:37 UTC 2020



> On 21 Jul 2020, at 03:45, Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm at ipinc.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 7/17/2020 11:35 AM, John W. Blue wrote:
>> Speaking about things to be annoyed over ..
>> 
>> I am still ticked that FreeBSD dropped BIND from the distribution for something called unwinding or whatever it is.
>> 
> 
> I'm not happy that happened either but the simple fact is that if BIND would quit dropping support so fast for it's older versions that never would have happened.  The fundamental problem was that BIND dropped support for it's older versions before the distros dropped support for their distros.  This is happening with a lot of other software packages.

There where lots of things happening at the time.  There was misinformation propagated to *BSD that BIND 9 going away much faster that any plans we had.  BIND 10 (now defunct) hadn’t even reached feature parity with BIND 9 which was still being developed because the DNS protocol is still be developed.

As for support life times.  BIND 9.17 will load most BIND 8.0 configurations.  Thats 20+ years of backwards compatibility.

Distributions also need to look at their own practices.  They ask us to supply long term support but do not actually integrate the maintenance releases but instead cherry-pick just the security fixes.  Maintenance is not just security fixes.  That means that we keep seeing bug reports that need to be diagnosed about bugs we have fixed years ago.  That really isn’t a good use of peoples time.  Not ours, not the distributions maintainers nor the users time.  Is there little wonder that we stop producing bug fixes releases for old version when the distributions don’t use them?

> When FreeBSD was used mostly for servers it wasn't a problem.  But more
> and more people are using it for desktop use where they want to basically install it and forget about it, never run patches, never give
> a fig about security.  Simpler programs like Unbound have less code
> and so less things to go wrong, need less patches, and are easier to
> support for a longer period of time so they get supported for a longer
> period of time.  Also, Unbound's main purpose in life is as a caching
> dns program.  Nobody who runs a server on FreeBSD uses Unbound.
> 
> Ted
> 
>> John
>> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: bind-users [mailto:bind-users-bounces at lists.isc.org] On Behalf Of Ted Mittelstaedt
>> Sent: Friday, July 17, 2020 12:57 PM
>> To: bind-users at lists.isc.org
>> Subject: Re: AW: Debian/Ubuntu: Why was the service renamed from bind9 to named?
>> 
>>> 
>>> Your personal experience is not the gobal truth. It is your opinion but other experienced pepole see it different than you.
>>> 
>> 
>> Hmm I'm a bit late to this discussion but I will chime in with the others.  The service always was called "named"  pronounced "name Dee"
>> it was called that in the Nutshell book which is easily the authoritative book on the subject, it was called this before you were born and it was kind of the height of hubris for it to ever be named
>> bind9 in a software distro.
>> 
>> In fact, the ONLY reason that the name "bind9" was ever even coined at all was because the changes from bind8 both in the syntax of the config file and how the program operated they wanted to boot admins in the behind to get them to change their config files.  It should have been put to bed as a name a long time ago, or named "bind version 9" like every other software program does with their versions.
>> 
>> So as an experienced person who has been doing this you-nuxs thing since
>> 1982 - I DON'T see it different - and in fact, I see it as a RETURN to what it originally was!
>> 
>> Ted
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Mark Andrews, ISC
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