[dns-operations] a note on fetching the root zone using "dig"

[Viktor Dukhovni]

On Fri, Nov 02, 2018 at 09:44:52AM +1100, Mark Andrews wrote:

> > And they also do not depend on the environment, while displaying native unicode stuff obviously depend on the locale settings, so things not controlled by the application.
> 
> So you can introduce some changes to defaults but not others?

There's no absolute rule.  What's needed is common-sense and some
attention to the principle least-surprise.

    1. Is the new behaviour generally useful
    2. Is the new behaviour needed on by default
    3. Is enabling the new behaviour surprising
    4. Is there a way to disable it that also works
       with older versions.

With "idnout", while there's an environment variable that makes it
possible to disable it without breaking the command-line syntax of
older versions, which addresses "4", my sense is that the case for
"2" is not very compelling, and it rather fails "3".

I occasionally want IDN output, but this is rare, and it is rather
a nuisance most of the time, and IMHO needlessly broke various
scripts.

-- 
	Viktor.