[bind10-dev] a thought on validation for changes

[Jerry Scharf]

Jeremy brought up the issue of how do you know that the data or 
configuration has not changed since the last command you typed.

I had one crude idea on how to do this that I wanted to toss out. It 
feels like there is the simple question of whether the section has 
changed and the more complex issue of how it has changed.

What if we had a sequence number for various sections that the datastore 
and it is incremented for every command or transaction that is applied 
to a section (data or configuration?) When the command is run, the new 
sequence number is returned. The user could then put in something like a 
require=sequence on a command and it would fail if any other changes 
have happened in the interval between commands. There could be a 
shorthand to retrieve the last sequence or you could just use the 
require without an argument to get the last sequence.

Figuring out what has changed is really hard if there is not some kind 
of audit tracking module on the server, so for now that would have to be 
punted to the user to sort out.

warmly,
jerry