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

[Ondřej Surý]

> On 2 Nov 2018, at 02:43, Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic.fr> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Nov 01, 2018 at 12:58:58PM +0100,
> Anand Buddhdev <anandb at ripe.net> wrote 
> a message of 27 lines which said:
> 
>> IMHO, IDN output should default to off, even if dig is linked against
>> libidn, and then whoever wants to see unicode can choose to do so with
>> +idnout.
> 
> This is a matter of taste and I don't think we will ever have a
> consensus here.

Especially, when there’s a mix of US-ASCII people and full UTF-8 people around.

Anyway, the solution Ray and I came up chatting about the issue is to disable IDN processing
when stdout is not tty.  This is based on rationale that humans usually want to consume
human readable strings, while `grep` is usually more happy with punycode.

There’s an associated issue and merge request in ISC’s GitLab:
https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/bind9/issues/653

Thanks,
Ondrej
--
Ondřej Surý
ondrej at sury.org