[DNSOP] Re: How black are black lies, really?

> On Jun 18, 2026, at 17:59, John R Levine <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 18 Jun 2026, Olafur Gudmundsson wrote:
>> In the 10 years that “X lies” have been in use there has only been minimal set of complaints all all of them from
>> end-user tools, no complaints about behavior of resolvers or forwarders, as they only care about one thing:
>> “Does the record being asked about exist?” full stop.
>> 
>> The existence of the name is a wider scope that only end-user-tools may care about.
> 
> You don't know anyone who's using RFC 8020?  I'm not snarking, it's a real question.

RFC8020 is about how a resolver should treat NXDOMAIN it does not say when it can expect an Authority to return NXDOMAIN 
so this is orthogonal usage cases. 
The main motivation if I recall correctly for starting the work on RFC 8020 was to deal with ENT names correctly, i.e. it is a valid name thus do not return NXDOMAIN for it. 

I will argue even further: an Authority can decide while responding to a specific query what kind of negative answer it returns: Literal or “Lie” 
For most of its existence DNS Working groups in the IETF have avoided the rathole of treatment of answers by end-user. 

Olafur 
PS: if the real reason for RFC8020 was lost during the work of the working group editing process that would not be the first time it happened. 

> 
> R's,
> John
> 
> PS: THe urge is great to subit an erratum for 8020 which replaces the entire text sith "just kidding."
> 
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