Hi, thanks Vincent and Gianfranco for offering your advice! On Wed, 22 Mar 2017 23:13:52 +0000 (UTC) Gianfranco Costamagna <locutusofborg@debian.org> wrote: > did you consider to merge the work from Fedora? > they already have a systemd service, and IIRC the project seems > somewhat dead upstream, so merging their work and sending them > patches might be beneficial for both distros. Please try to have a > similar working tool, rather than diverging too much, specially when > upstream is not active anymore. Well, I had looked at systemd unit files for arpwatch using web search. Most of the unit files I found only allow starting one instance of arpwatch. This is also true for the unit file included in Fedora. At least openSUSE has a systemd service file which allows launching multiple instances of arpwatch, but it does not allow different configurations for the individual interfaces (which our current LSB init script is capable of). I would like to avoid a situation where upgrading to the new version requires writing systemd unit files, so we need to keep the ability to have multiple instances of arpwatch which can be configured differently. I think calling the project "somewhat dead" is an understatement after 7+ years of inactivity. This is a long time and different distros have accumulated different patches. There also used to be an arpwatch-ng fork, which is now also dead. Debian's patches introduce quite a bit of functionality to arpwatch as well. Now directly comparing Fedora and Debian, the arpwatch binaries are pretty different (the introduced patches add different feature, newly introduced arguments are conflicting, e.g. '-s', …). While I agree that a strong cooperation between the distros, especially for packages with dead upstream, would be mutually beneficial, it is hard to start doing that after the packages have diverted so much. > I don't think you want people having issues when switching from > Fedora to Debian and vice-versa, specially with systemd configuration > files :) Unless we want to drop some features available using our current LSB init script (thereby forcing some admins to write their own systemd unit files just to keep their current arpwatch setup), I don't think incompatibilities can be avoided. > (as pkg-security team we might have some interests in having the > package under our team, so you might find sponsors asking us to > review your work!) Good to know, I will X-Debbugs-CC pkg-security once I file an RFS bug. Team maintenance would be really nice :) . Regards Lukas
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