Thoughts for the use of DNS in dvc.
You are basically starting to reinvent the DNS seed code, only not as complete as what it already does.
For dvc, the only real change that should be made, and maybe even the first change till we make a decent dns seed supporting server, should be to move the finding of the sources of the receiver files to txt or srv records instead of hardcoding them as I posted a bit earlier.
Not really - we're talking about 2 different things.
I'm talking about replacing the existing hard coded IP addresses with DNS based lookups - these authoritative nodes help bootstrap the rest of the network.
You're talking about the ddns DNS boostrap - which ultimately is a subdomain of the first. It's a worthwhile pursuit - but requires infrastructure and a balanced distribution to be effective. One of the reasons for IRC is that there already exists a well distributed network that can be used to leverage bootstrapping.
No, look at the code. It does replace the hard coded address, if dnseeds are found it no longer uses the hardcoded address as fall back. In fact this is one of the bugs in the existing code. It puts direct nodes in as dns seeds and these are gone. Now this happened to work when they were up even though this was wrong. Now that they are down, it gets these addresses and never hits a hardcoded fall back and fails. Though since it also had no hardcoded fall backs that did not matter either. I changed this, and put in the two good seeds nodes for this. This is all part of the better bootstrapping version that seems to be working decently now. Now usually dns seeds servers are ddns, and do try to be smarter about spreading the load an d such but nothing stops them from being instead the subset you are talking about, as is. To get what you want all we would need to do is change the dns seeds to include the simplified static dns entries, and of course have the dns servers out there and maintained.