[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#785325: Deprecate .local detection in favor of NEWS.Debian and disabling service?

[Josh Triplett]

Package: avahi-daemon
Version: 0.6.31-5
Severity: normal
File: /etc/network/if-up.d/avahi-daemon

Currently, avahi-daemon ships a network hook
/etc/network/if-up.d/avahi-daemon , which detects if the local network
uses .local for something other than mDNS, and if so, disables Avahi.

This script can take a non-trivial amount of time to run, especially on
networks with *interesting* DNS (e.g. if the probe for .local ends up
waiting for a timeout); on my system, I've observed it taking more time
than the rest of the network bringup process combined.

I don't think it makes sense for *every* system to pay the cost of this
detection on every network bringup.  People have had several years to
fix their networks, and anyone still on such a network probably won't be
able to change that anytime soon.  Could we deprecate this hook, in
favor of a note in NEWS.Debian explaining how to disable the avahi
service if necessary (e.g. with update-rc.d or systemctl)?  (Or, for
people who roam between networks where they want to use avahi and broken
networks using .local as a unicast DNS suffix, ship the script in
/usr/share/doc/avahi-daemon as an example that NEWS.Debian could
reference?)

- Josh Triplett

-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.0.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=C.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages avahi-daemon depends on:
ii  adduser              3.113+nmu3
ii  bind9-host [host]    1:9.9.5.dfsg-9
ii  dbus                 1.8.16-2
ii  init-system-helpers  1.23
ii  libavahi-common3     0.6.31-5
ii  libavahi-core7       0.6.31-5
ii  libc6                2.19-18
ii  libcap2              1:2.24-8
ii  libdaemon0           0.14-6
ii  libdbus-1-3          1.8.16-2
ii  libexpat1            2.1.0-6+b3
ii  lsb-base             4.1+Debian13+nmu1

Versions of packages avahi-daemon recommends:
pn  libnss-mdns  <none>

Versions of packages avahi-daemon suggests:
pn  avahi-autoipd  <none>

-- no debconf information