[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#769636: avahi-utils: please soften the dependency on avahi-daemon

[Johannes Schauer]

Package: avahi-utils
Version: 0.6.31-4+b1
Severity: normal

Hi,

I wanted to get a list of all mDNS services in my local network. Thus I
installed avahi-utils and everything worked fine. But much later I
discovered that I had a new service running in the background of my
system: avahi-daemon. It must've been installed together with
avahi-utils as avahi-utils depends on avahi-daemon. I stopped the
avahi-daemon process and can confirm that avahi-browse works just fine
without the avahi-daemon running. Thus I think it is unnecessary to
force a new service being installed when avahi-utils is installed. I see
several ways to solve this problem:

avahi-daemon could move from a Depends to a Recommends of avahi-utils
because obviously the daemon is not needed for some functionality the
package avahi-utils provides

The avahi-browse program could be split into a separate package which
does not Depend on avahi-daemon (in case other software in avahi-utils
has a hard requirement of avahi-daemon).

What do you think?

cheers, josch