Re: avahi-daemon
Hi,
On Thu, Feb 23, 2006, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña wrote:
> IMHO the problem here is having a music program (as rhythmbox) Recommends:
> avahi-daemon, when IMHO it should be Suggests: . The functionality
> provided by avahi-daemon (a network service for sharing music) is not something
> I would say that all rhythmbox users require (based on rhythmbox' description, which
> looks like a music library organization tool for me). However, it will get it
> installed per default by users using 'aptitude' (not 'apt') which is the
> recommended tool these days.
It would be overly complicated to handle the case of a Suggests instead
of a Recommends correctly: even if the code was updated to handle both
cases at run time, and would hide the relevant options when these are
not available, the documentation would still point at unavailable
features.
And the popup mixing application level information with package level
information would also be awful: "You should install package foo to get
this functionality".
> If I were you (aliban) I would bug rhythmbox. It seems that Bug #349478 got
> it to reduce the Depends: on that daemon to a Recommends:, I think it would
> be better to have that as Suggests:
> Disclaimer: I don't know much about rhythmbox and the relationship of ahavi-daemon
You might as well get the issue documented in the RB BTS if you want,
I'll simply link to this thread where I clearly state that I think it's
a desirable feature which should be working by default. :)
The dep was strict because RB wouldn't start without it. Now it will
start, but with a warning. I'm quite sure you can get it to crash if
avahi isn't there though, but that's a bug.
> Maintainers remember: it's much better to *not* install/activate a network
> service than to have a service, even if it's chrooted, or running under lower
> privileges (like the ahavi maintainers describe in
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MainInclusionReportAvahi) which, BTW, is not that
> common. The keyword here is 'exposure'.
The avahi-daemon is nicely chrooted, and runs under a different user.
You just can't have the functionality of "plug'n'play" on a network
without any central server without listening at some point to
something...
> Really, do *almost all* rhythmbox users need to share music (and consequentely need
> ahavi)?
That's not the point, the point is to make it easy to do so. And yes,
a lot of users share music between computers. Those people want that
to be simple. You can't cut every feature out because only 10% of the
users use it.
It's not like you're running Rhythmbox on a firewall, and iptables is
still there, you can remove avahi, you can configure it not to start
etc.
Cheers,
--
Loïc Minier <lool@dooz.org>
Current Earth status: NOT DESTROYED
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