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dhc* in NetBSD 7.0



Prompted by the "dhclient" discussion that just came up on current-users, I'd like to get the ball rolling on deciding how to move forward on support for dhcp in NetBSD 7.

As it stands, we have two dhcp clients in base: an old (3.x) version of ISC's dhclient, and a much newer, well-supported dhcpcd. dhcpcd is much more full-featured than the version of dhclient that we have - so it would seem to be a good choice going forward, except for the dhcp *server* issue. NetBSD has included a dhcp server in base since at least 1996 (I didn't check further back), but it's not entirely clear to me that we *need* a dhcp server in base; this would seem to be a perfect application for pkgsrc. (Indeed, I needed some newer features than the one we have in base, so I installed ISC dhcp 4.x from pkgsrc, and it works well)

At the very least, we should not be shipping code that upstream no longer supports - we have DHCP 3.x, which was desupported by ISC over a year ago. (Actually, I believe the specific version we have lost support even sooner). I see a few different options, and would like to know people's thoughts on how to proceed:

1) Remove ISC DHCP from base entirely; this would mean NetBSD 7.0 would not ship with a DHCP server, and would have dhcpcd as the only DHCP client in base.

2) Update ISC DHCP in-tree and continue supporting dhclient, dhcpd, AND dhcpcd. This will require a fair amount of work to discover the various reasons we've stuck with 3.0.3, and address these concerns. If we choose this path, we should update to the latest version with "Extended Support" at the time of branching and/or during the beta period - we want to make sure 7.0 has a good long life.

3) Update ISC DHCP as per item 2, but don't build/install dhclient by default. Why do we need two DHCP clients in base?

4) Update ISC DHCP, and remove dhcpcd from base. (I personally don't like this option at all, nor do I expect it to be the choice, but I include it here for completeness).

5) Some Other Option that I've missed here.

I would love to be enlightened as to any issues I may have missed, or glossed over. Anyone with relevant input, please speak up!

+j



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