Re: proposal: dhcpcd-base as standard DHCP client starting with Trixie

[Martin-Éric Racine <martin-eric.racine@iki.fi>]

On Mon, Jun 19, 2023 at 9:11 PM Santiago Ruano Rincón
<santiagorr@riseup.net> wrote:
> El 19/06/23 a las 13:54, Martin-Éric Racine escribió:
> > Greetings,
> >
> > Seeing how the ISC DHCP suite has reached EOL upstream, now might be a
> > good time to re-visit Debian's choice of standard DHCP client shipping
> > with priority:important.
> >
> > I hereby propose bin:dhcpcd-base:
> >
> > 1) already supported by ifupdown.
> > 2) dual stack (DHCPv4, Bonjour, RA, DHCPv6 with PD) with privilege separation.
> > 3) writes both IPv4 and IPv6 name servers to /etc/resolv.conf
> > 4) supports /etc/resolv.conf.head and /etc/resolv.conf.tail
> > 5) a mere inet line in /etc/network/interfaces is sufficient to
> > configure both stacks.
> ...
>
> I agree that dhcpcd seems the best alternative to isc-dhcp-client for
> the moment, and I'll make the relevant changes in ifupdown as soon as I
> can. Josué, any thoughts?

1) As someone pointed out in the thread, the reason why
isc-dhcp-client had priority:important probably was to ensure that
debootstrap would pull it, since debootstrap ignores Recommends and
packages with a priority lower than standard.

2) However, as long as ifupdown explictly depends on a package, it can
also pull dependencies with a lower priority. Right now ifupdown
Recommends "isc-dhcp-client | dhcp-client" which debootstrap would
ignore. It would have to Depends "dhcpcd-base | dhcp-client" instead.

3) At that point, swapping the priority of isc-dhcp-client and
dhcpcd-base merely becomes "nice to have". Heck, the priority of both
could, in principle, be optional, just as long as ifupdown explicitly
Depends on a DHCP client, and the first alternative is a real package.

Martin-Éric