[dns-stats-users] DNS-STATS Compactor - Advanced warning of the 1.0.0 beta release

[Sara Dickinson]

Hi All, 

We have been working on updating the DNS-STATS Compactor to match the C-DNS specification now published in RFC8618. We plan to designated this the 1.0.0 DNS-STATS Compactor release. There are a number of significant changes that were required to support the more flexible specification introduced since the -04 version of the C-DNS draft that is the basis of the current 0.12 release. This email is intended to provide a timeline for the 1.0.0 release and an outline of the changes.

Timeline
----------
We plan to do a 1.0.0-beta1 release on Friday 27th Sept. We expect to have at least two months of beta testing, possibly longer. Please note:

* Version 1.0.0 will be backwards compatible with C-DNS files produced by all previous versions of the DNS-STATS Compactor. In other words in version 1.0.0:
  ** compactor will write only version 1.0 C-DNS as defined in RFC8618
  ** inspector will read version 1.0 C-DNS files and also the two older private C-DNS formats (0.2 and 0.5) used by the previous DNS-STATS Compactor releases.
* The default behaviour does not change in the 1.0.0 release compared to the 0.12 release but there are additional configuration files required/available.
* We are asking users to test the beta code, but are *not* recommending it for production use until the official 1.0.0 release happens later this year. 


Overview of changes
----------------------------
* The most significant change is that in the 1.0 C-DNS format almost all the fields are optional, whereas in the earlier draft specification a minimum set of fields was always captured. The default behaviour of the DNS-STATS Compactor remains the same: all fields are captured.
* The ‘include’ parameter in the compactor configuration file is deprecated in 1.0.0 as it cannot provide the full flexibility required by the 1.0 C-DNS specification. It is replaced by a new file ‘excluded_fields.conf’ which allows for fine grained management of specific data fields. The ‘include’ parameter will be removed in a future release.
* This new optionality adds complexity to PCAP reconstruction for cases where not all data was captured. A new file specifying defaults for potentially missing fields is introduced in 1.0.0, which in installed by default and must be present when reconstructing PCAPS.

The 1.0.0 code is currently available in a branch on GitHub:
https://github.com/dns-stats/compactor/tree/feature/v1.0.0
The Changelog is here:
https://github.com/dns-stats/compactor/blob/feature/v1.0.0/ChangeLog.txt
And the updated 1.0.0. User Guide with more details of the new functionality is available here:
https://github.com/dns-stats/compactor/wiki/user-guide-1.0.0-beta0.pdf <https://github.com/dns-stats/compactor/wiki/user-guide-1.0.0-beta0.pdf>
https://github.com/dns-stats/compactor/wiki/user-guide-1.0.0-beta0.html

This code will be merged into the develop & master branches on Friday 27th and new 1.0.0-beta1 packages will also be made available then. 

If you have any questions, please let us know!

Best regards

Sara.
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