Bug#1006264: RFH: dhcpcd5 -- DHCPv4, IPv6RA and DHCPv6 client with IPv4LL support

[Noah Meyerhans <noahm@debian.org>]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2022 at 11:22:08AM +0200, Martin-Éric Racine wrote:
> Given how upstream ISC will stop development of its DHCP suite by the end of 2022 [1], Debian will need to select a new stock DHCP client to ship with Priority:Important.
> 
> dhcpcd5 seems like the most potential replacement. It covers most IPv4 and IPv6 usage cases, and upstream regularly updates the code. However, the Debian package hasn't been updated in ages.

We talked a little bit about the future of DHCP clients in #995189,
though we didn't come up with a definitive plan.  Regardless of what
happens with dhcpcd5, we do need to move forward with something.  Doing
nothing (which effectively leaves us with an unsupported dhclient by
default) is not a good option.

As far as I know, there are no drop-in replacements for dhclient.  Thus,
the change is going to be pretty significant for dhclient users.  On the
plus side, we get to use this as an opportunity to figure out what we
really want to support long-term.

For desktop systems running NetworkManager, it sounds like we don't need
a dedicated DHCP client at all; nm has DHCP client support built in and
uses it by default.

For servers, the ideal situation is somewhat less clear, but there was
at least some interest in using systemd-networkd (with or without
netplan).

So we may not need to specifically promote a DHCP client like dhcpcd5 to
priority:important.  Systemd-networkd could be the default, and
NetworkManager could be used when it's present.

noah