Greetings again. These are comments on the recently-issued -02 draft. Overall, it looks good, but there are still some issues to be addressed before publication.
The requirements in Section 2 should be clearly stated as being appropriate only for the authoritative name service. The last bullet says this, but the first bullet says "MUST implement core DNS [RFC1035] and clarifications to the DNS [RFC2181]." That could be interpreted as saying that the root name service must follow all the rules of RFC 1035, not just those that apply to authoritative name servers, and there are a bunch that should not be required. Consider changing that sentence fragment to "MUST implement core DNS [RFC1035] and clarifications to the DNS [RFC2181], as an authoritative name service".
Another bullet in Section 2 may be problematic:
MUST generate checksums when sending UDP datagrams and MUST verify
checksums when receiving UDP datagrams containing a non-zero
checksum.
What happens if a root name server receives a UDP datagram with a bad checksum? It fails verification, but then what? This sentence *might* incorporate the following clarification, but I'm not sure if it actually matches the intent.
MUST generate checksums when sending UDP datagrams, and MUST
ignore a received UDP datagram containing a non-zero checksum
when that checksum does not verify.
If that's not the intent, I'm not sure what "verify" means without a follow-on action.
Editorial:
- There are many places where spaces are missing, such as "domain name system(DNS)" and "IPv4[RFC0791]" (there are many others).
- The first sentence of the Introduction should be changed to reflect the fact that, when published, this document obsoletes RFC 2870. Instead of "[RFC2870] discusses", it should say "[RFC2870] discussed".
--Paul Hoffman