[net-dns-users] section RR counts read only

[Calle Dybedahl]

On 19 dec 2012, at 16:31, Dick Franks <rwfranks at acm.org> wrote:

> It should *never* come in handy!
> 
> If the packet arrived on the wire, the counts are set from the header
> which, in the absence of corruption or truncation, will be identical
> to the number of RRs in the corresponding section.

You're making assumptions about how people will want to use your module, and by doing so unnecessarily limiting what it can be used for. We have, for example, written small DNS servers in Perl specifically to respond to queries with packets that were broken in ways ordinary nameservers couldn't be configured to produce, for testing and investigation purposes. If Net::DNS had prevented us from creating those packets, that would have been extremely frustrating and in the best case caused us a lot of unnecessary work. In the worst case it would have prevented us entirely from doing what we wanted to do.

I'm reminded of this old quote from Larry Wall:
"Usenet was not designed to stop you from saying stupid things, because that would also stop me from saying clever things."

-- 
Calle Dybedahl
calle at init.se -*- +46 703 - 970 612