Re: Retiring dhclient

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 09:00:53AM +0800, Ted Lemon wrote:
> If dhcpcd really is better than dhclient, I could probably hack ini
> DHCPv6 support pretty easily.

I think it is significantly better than the 3.x code we have in base.
I don't know what the state of multi-interface support in dhclient4 is
to know whether it can compare. Support for IPv4 LL is definitely nice
to have, but a bit smaller.

DHCPv6 support is a sore point in NetBSD for now and fixing that one way
or the other would be appreciated. Getting the support for the server is
pretty much a no brainer. For the client, it raises a few questions
about which data set to pick when both DHCP and DHCPv6 are available for
an interface and have a non-empty symmetric difference. Another item is
how to deal with partial support in the presence of multiple interfaces.
Consider having both IPv4 and IPv6 available via WLAN and only IPv4 via
Ethernet -- do you still want to enable IPv6 routing? What is the status
in this area for dhclient?

What about RA handling? Does dhclient depend on the kernel / rtsol for
that?

> One thing that spooks me about dhcpcd though is that it supports dbus,
> which I've always found to be basically unuseable.   But I haven't
> tried it in years.   Do you consider this a valuable feature of dhcpcd
> for NetBSD, or just a bullet point?

It exists for the sake of network manager like applications. It is also
a separate program, so no nasty tentacles in the main code :)
Personally, I don't use it.

Joerg