Package: avahi-daemon
Version: 0.6.22-3
Severity: normal
Avahi in Debian should *not* be enabling IPv6 support by default.
Why not?
- Brings no advantages. The intended audience for Zeroconf is desktop
uses, normal people. People who don't care about IPv6. If people run
IPv6 right now they surely should be capable of enabling support for
it in Avahi by reconfiguring a single line in the config file, too.
- Because it doubles the network load imposed by Avahi for no gain
- Because it causes all services to show up twice in browsers: once via
IPv6 and once via IPv4.
- Because people might see these duplicates and thus might end up
hardcoding their code to only register services via IPv4 instead of
leaving the protocols to Avahi. Thus in the long run if the time comes
to enable IPv6 by default you'd first have to fix all those apps.
- Because it is a big deviation from how other distros do it.
- Because I am upstream and I kindly ask you to disable it. Please,
please, With cream on top! ;-)
- Instead of enabling IPv6 support in Avahi in Debian prematurely you guys
should first fix the remaining issues.
- Because you guys don't follow my nicely figured out plan to adopt IPv6
in Avahi. (see below)
The road to IPv6 for Avahi should be:
- Implement some logic so that duplicates are filtered out from browse
requests. This is harder than it sounds but would be very useful for
multihomed hosts or hosts with VPNs, too.
- Add a config option to selectively a) disable IPv6 completely b)
register AAAA RRs via IPv4, but don't use IPv6 as addresses, c)
register services by IPv4+IPv6 by default, leave browsing as IPv4-only
d) register and browse for services with both protos e) register
IPv6-only, but browse both. f) Use only IPv6 as proto, but still
register A RRs on it. g) Only use IPv6.
Right now we have a), b), f), g), d). We still lack c), and e).
Then, every few years or so we should move from one step to the next.
We're right now at b), you guys jumped to d) without going through c)
first. The code for c)/e) is missing right now. Instead of skipping it
someone needs to sit down and just write it.
So please, for proper IPv6 support, fix the remaining issues first. And
then do it in a sane way instead of doing the third step without having
done the second.
I'll will fix this eventually, when I find the time to and the issue is
pressing enough. I am always happy to accept patches, if you guys want
to speed this up.
Also, let's not forget that there is not a single installation around
which uses exclusively IPv6 these days. All IPv6 installations are
multi-stack installations. Thus using IPv4 for link local service
discovery is absolutely fine.
Thanks,
Lennart
-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.24-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] (charmap=ISO-8859-15)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Versions of packages avahi-daemon depends on:
ii adduser 3.107 add and remove users and groups
ii bind9-host [host] 1:9.4.2-10 Version of 'host' bundled with BIN
ii dbus 1.2.1-1 simple interprocess messaging syst
ii libavahi-common3 0.6.22-3 Avahi common library
ii libavahi-core5 0.6.22-3 Avahi's embeddable mDNS/DNS-SD lib
ii libc6 2.7-10 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii libcap1 1:1.10-14 support for getting/setting POSIX.
ii libdaemon0 0.12-1 lightweight C library for daemons
ii libdbus-1-3 1.2.1-1 simple interprocess messaging syst
ii libexpat1 1.95.8-4 XML parsing C library - runtime li
ii lsb-base 3.1-24 Linux Standard Base 3.1 init scrip
Versions of packages avahi-daemon recommends:
ii libnss-mdns 0.10-3 NSS module for Multicast DNS name
-- no debconf information
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