[net-dns-users] Post-0.68 changes, again

[Brandon Black]

I've seen there's a couple older threads on this from Dec/Jan, but I'm late
to the party.  My DNS daemon ( https://github.com/blblack/gdnsd ) was
relying heavily on Net::DNS in its testsuite, and was compatible with
releases 0.63 -> 0.68.  As you can imagine, the testsuite intentionally
generates all sorts of invalid requests and wants fine-grained control over
every aspect of the packets constructed.  This was working fine (a few
little hacks here and there aside) up through 0.68.  I wasn't even aware of
the December release activity until very recently, when a few Linux distros
upgraded their perl-Net-DNS packages to 0.72 and users started complaining
about testsuite failures.

As mentioned in the past threads, the changes are pretty nasty from my
perspective.  You've removed a bunch of previous functionality for DNS
packet manipulation, various APIs are now deprecated or broken without any
significant overlap/warning period, etc.  I don't see how Net::DNS 0.69+
can do the job I need it to do (which 0.68 was doing a great job of) at
all.  Even if 0.69+ could do it, I doubt I could cleanly make my testsuite
support any kind of compatibility range (e.g. 0.66 -> 0.72, or really any
range that includes 0.68 + 0.69) since so many things were broken
immediately in a single release.

At this point, given there's been no real movement or apparent desire to
fix the situation upstream, I'll probably just have to include an entire
stale copy of 0.68 within my project for the foreseeable future.  It's the
distros upgrading that creates the problematic fallout here.  They may not
realize that 0.68 and 0.69 releases of the same project name have such
dramatic API breakage between them (and who could blame them?).

For future reference: it would've been better to just start a new module
name (Net::BetterDNS or something, I don't know) rather than introduce so
much breakage in a random version bump of a module with such a long
history.  Net::DNS could've been left as a deprecated 0.68 without future
maintenance or something.

-- Brandon
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.nlnetlabs.nl/pipermail/net-dns-users/attachments/20130410/d268854a/attachment.htm>