DEVELOPMENT VISION

Note: ldns has been in maintenance mode since 2020, with no plans for major
features. We welcome PRs from contributors who want to add new functionality.
We also actively fix bugs, so users can continue to rely on ldns if its
current features meet their needs.

We will continue to make occasional use of ldns in an experimental
setting, such as during an IETF Hackathon to build a proof of concept for an
Internet Draft.

The natural successor to the ldns library is the domain library for Rust:
https://github.com/NLnetLabs/domain

We offer drop-in replacements for commonly used ldns example tools in dnst:
https://github.com/NLnetLabs/dnst

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Contents:
	REQUIREMENTS
	INSTALLATION
		libdns
		examples
		drill
	INFORMATION FOR SPECIFIC OPERATING SYSTEMS
		Mac OS X
		Solaris
	KNOWN ISSUES
		pyldns

Project page:
http://www.nlnetlabs.nl/ldns/
On that page you can also subscribe to the ldns mailing list.

* Development
ldns is mainly developed on Linux and FreeBSD. It is regularly tested to
compile on other systems like Solaris and Mac OS X.

REQUIREMENTS
- OpenSSL (Optional, but needed for features like DNSSEC)
  - OpenSSL >= 0.9.7f for DANE support
  - OpenSSL >= 1.0.0  for ECDSA and GOST support
- libpcap (Optional, but needed for examples/ldns-dpa)
- (GNU) libtool (in OSX, that's glibtool, not libtool)
- GNU make

INSTALLATION
1. Unpack the tarball
2. cd ldns-<VERSION>
3. ./configure --with-examples --with-drill
   (optionally compile python bindings too with: --with-pyldns)
4. make
5. make install


* Building from repository

If you are building from the repository you will need to have (gnu)
autotools like libtool and autoreconf installed. A list of all the commands
needed to build everything can be found in README.git. Note that the actual
commands may be a little bit different on your machine. Most notably, you'll
need to run libtoolize (or glibtoolize). If you skip this step, you'll get
an error about missing config.sub.

* Developers
ldns is developed by the ldns team at NLnet Labs. This team currently
consists of:
  o Willem Toorop
  o Wouter Wijngaards

Former main developers:
  o Jelte Jansen
  o Miek Gieben
  o Matthijs Mekking

* Credits
We have received patches from the following people, thanks!
  o Bedrich Kosata
  o Erik Rozendaal
  o Håkan Olsson
  o Jakob Schlyter
  o Paul Wouters
  o Simon Vallet
  o Ondřej Surý
  o Karel Slany
  o Havard Eidnes
  o Leo Baltus
  o Dag-Erling Smørgrav
  o Felipe Gasper


INFORMATION FOR SPECIFIC OPERATING SYSTEMS

MAC OS X

For MACOSX 10.4 and later, it seems that you have to set the
MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET environment variable to 10.4 before running
make. Apparently it defaults to 10.1.

This appears to be a known problem in 10.2 to 10.4, see:
http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1233.html
for more information.


SOLARIS

In Solaris multi-architecture systems (which have both 32-bit and
64-bit support), it can be a bit taxing to convince the system to
compile in 64-bit mode. Jakob Schlyter has kindly contributed a build
script that sets the right build and link options. You can find it in
contrib/build-solaris.sh

KNOWN ISSUES

A complete list of currently known open issues can be found here:
https://github.com/NLnetLabs/ldns/issues

* pyldns
Compiling pyldns produces many ``unused parameter'' warnings.  Those are
harmless and may safely be ignored.
Also, when building with SWIG older than 2.0.4, compiling
pyldns produces many ``missing initializer'' warnings. Those are harmless
too.

# The ldns git repository can found at:
# git.nlnetlabs.nl/ldns/

# small list of commands to build all on a linux system
# libtoolize is needed for most other targets

# on Solaris, and other systems that may not have
# the default 'automake' and 'aclocal' script aliases,
# the correct versions may need to be set. On those
# systems, the 'autoreconf' line should be changed to:
# AUTOMAKE=automake-1.10 ACLOCAL=aclocal-1.10 autoreconf

# older versions of libtoolize do not support --install
# so you might need to remove that (with newer versions
# it is needed)
git submodule update --init
libtoolize -ci
autoreconf -fi
./configure --with-examples --with-drill # --with-pyldns --with-p5-dns-ldns
make
make doc  # needs doxygen for the html pages
(cd pcat && autoreconf && ./configure && make)
(cd examples/nsd-test && autoreconf && ./configure && make)

ldns - snapshot releases

Snapshot releases are not official released. They can be released to
interested parties for development.

Snapshots can be recognized from the date in the tar file name.

They should not be used for packaging in distributions.