ISC announced the move to a new model for generating BIND DNS server releases. New stable branches will now be formed every two years, rather than once a year. In addition, the new model will increase the branch maintenance time up to 4 years. Thus, the 9.16 branch will be maintained until 2024, and the 9.18 release will be released only in 2022.
It is noted that the change was approved because the developers are not ready to release the new 9.18 branch now, and the functionality of the current 9.16 stable branch is quite meets the needs of users. The experimental 9.17 branch under development, from which the stable 9.18 release is based, does not have any useful improvements over the 9.16 branch.
At the same time, the development of the new network stack that appeared in the 9.16 branch based on the libuv library, which is still available in parallel with the old stack, continues. The main challenge in shaping a future 9.18 release is to bring the new stack to full parity with the old stack, but it takes more time to complete. As for the expected support for DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH) technologies in branch 9.18, it was decided to backport them to branch 9.16.
