Backwards incompatible change: PowerDNS (2.9.x to 3.1.x)

[Morten Stevens]

On 27.11.2012 12:50, James Findley wrote:

> That is untrue.  If your configuration contains the 'wildcards' parameter, powerdns 3.0+ will not start, but it's a supported and valid option for powerdns 2.9.  And as it doesn't check the config when restarting, this will cause downtime for unwary users who upgrade.

Hi James,

please note:

http://doc.powerdns.com/changelog.html

The pdns.conf 'wildcards'-setting did not do anything in 3.0, so it was 
removed.

> That's again not true.  If you have customers with zones without SOAs, these work in 2.9 - they do not work at all in 3.0+.

This is a non-RFC-compliant setup. Zones without SOA record is something 
that you should never do!

RFC 1035:
[...] 2. Exactly one SOA RR should be present at the top of the zone.

> I appreciate the work you do to maintain this package in EPEL, but particularly with packages like DNS servers extreme care needs to be taken when deciding to upgrade to a different major version.
>
> The powerdns documentation contains numerous warnings that it's not a trivial upgrade - these warnings should have been heeded, especially as the number of bugfixes are fairly small - it's mostly a feature upgrade which should not be a priority for EPEL.

I agree with you fully that we need to be careful with such upgrades.

It isn't really a feature upgrade. The main reason for this decision was 
the security aspect to make sure that we get security patches for 
PowerDNS until 2020.

I can't justify using an old version excluding future security patches. 
The upgrade effort is minimal in relation to the security aspect for the 
next 8 years. For example, the bind version shipped with RHEL 6.0 was 
9.7.0-P2 and the latest 6.3 release contains bind 9.8.2 RC1. (Yes, I 
know this is only a minor upgrade)

Thanks for understanding.

Best regards,

Morten