Bug#627357: gnome-desktop-environment: I would like to remove avahi-daemon because mdns slows down PTR lookup

[Simon McVittie]

On Thu, 19 May 2011 at 16:11:07 -0500, Karl O. Pinc wrote:
> gnome-desktop-environment depends on gnome-user-share which,
> eventually, depends on avahi-daemon.  MDNS greatly slows down reverse
> dns (PTR) lookups

You should be able to address this without changes to the metapackage
by removing libnss-mdns, which is recommended by avahi-daemon, but
leaving avahi-daemon installed and running. Result: Avahi continues
to work if applications like gnome-user-share explicitly use it
(via libavahi-* or direct use of its D-Bus API), but you can no longer
resolve through Avahi via the glibc name service switch API (so
"ping foo.local" will no longer work).

Removing mdns from nsswitch.conf but leaving mdns4_minimal might also
be worth considering for your situation: mdns4_minimal will only
resolve hostnames that match *.local or 169.254.*.*, and only with IPv4.

     S