Re: Retiring dhclient

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost>]

On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 03:44:22PM -0800, John Nemeth wrote:
> On Apr 7, 11:45am, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> }
> } I would like to retire dhclient before netbsd-6. I don't think it
> 
>      Why?  I have a moderately complex setup and know how to use it.  I
> don't know dhcpcd.  Obviously I could learn it, but that's not the

It's duplicative, the system should not grow without bound, and we should
not ship two tools for the same thing for longer than we have to.

In practice, dhcpcd provides the same set of hooks that dhclient does,
with the same names as the dhclient hook scripts, so it is very, very
nearly a drop-in replacement that simply works better.

This was one of my original objections to importing dhcpcd -- that it
needed to provide dhclient compatible hook scripts -- and it was fixed
immediately by the dhcpcd maintainer and has been fixed for a long time.

The claim that is isn't exactly dhclient so we shouldn't remove dhclient
would have worked, for me, for the 5.0 release.  But we've now had a
whole release cycle with both so there has been more than adequate
warning.  And the bloat should not persist.  Yes, other things surely
bloat the system more.  No, that is not an excuse to ship two daemons
that do exactly the same thing, and to keep deferring removal of one
of them far into the future.

I would very strongly urge core to remove dhclient for 6.0.

Thor