History — GNUnet documentation

The GNUnet Assigned Numbers Authority (GANA) contains various registries we maintain, for GNUnet other projects that need names and numbers for use in network protocols. If you need to open a new registry, please feel free to contact us at gana@gnunet.org.

The registries can be found here: https://git.gnunet.org/gana.git

# History

Barry Leiba wrote on April 4th 2020 that “Neither IANA nor participants in the IETF will have any necessary expertise to evaluate registration requests in the sort of registry described, and no one will be well served by the creation of such a registry at IANA. It would be far better to have a registration process be described in this document involving experts from the industry as reviewers and maintenance of the registrations by an industry organization, rather than by IANA.”

So here we are. As IETF/IANA “lack the necessary expertise to operate a registry” for names and numbers used in network protocols, the GNUnet project is happy to step up.

# License

The GANA database is licensed under the GPL. See `COPYING` in the Git repository.

# Design

Each registry must have a unique name and all associated information lives in a directory under that unique name in the Git repository.

Each registry must include at least the following files:

- `README[.*]`: document describing the purpose of the registry in English

- `POLICY[.*]`: registration policy, explaining required fields and the procedure for adding, updating and deleting entries

- `registry.rec`: GNU recutils data file with all of the current entries in the registry

- `Makefile`: GNU make makefile with a `make check` target to run the validation logic. Ideally, the registry.rec should be written such that the `check` target is simply invoking `recfix --check registry.rec`. Additional targets to convert `data.rec` to various formats may be defined. In particular, see `format.sh` in the root directory of the Git repository (try `--help`).