[LEAPSECS] Bulletin C and all that

[Zefram]

Rob Seaman wrote:
>Yes, but we might also want to use the extra space to support additional
>features.  This would also encourage switching to AAAA.

I think if we offer different information it should be under different
domain names, which would mean that there's no clash.  Looking up
2015-06.tai-utc.example should be interpreted as a request for the
TAI-UTC difference that applies to June 2015.  That information may be
offered in multiple forms (under multiple RRtypes), but other information
belongs somewhere else.  It's not as if domain names are in short supply.

Theoretically, the way DNS is supposed to work, 2015-06.example would be
the location at which to store many kinds of information about June 2015,
with different RRtypes used to specify the type of information desired.
But we're not imagining specifying our own custom RRtypes here, and we're
already using RRtypes to determine the format of information rather than
the type of information requested.

>An alternate formulation might be to query when_is_the_next.leapsec.com
>to return a date, and then convert that date to july2015.leapsec.com
>to retrieve the new value and flags.  Is there some obvious advantage
>(other than the bigger ranges) for separating the two values?

They're answering different questions.  "When is the next leap second?" is
quite different from, and a much rarer need than, "is there a leap
second at the end of June 2015?".  (In my proposed system one would
ask the latter by asking for the TAI-UTC differences for June and July,
and comparing them.)

-zefram