Re: PROPSAL: import Apple's mDNSResponder

[Ty Sarna <ty%sarna.org@localhost>]

On Sep 20, 2009, at 8:09 PM, Daniel Carosone wrote:

> * What server and client applications in base would want to do this?

Potentially all of them. Any client benefits, if we have nss support.  
True, nss support can be provided by pkgsrc. But, that's also true of  
NIS and Hesiod, which we build in, and mDNS is of much greater general  
interest than Hesiod, I think.

Likewise any server potentially benefits by being easier for clients  
to find.

Zeroconf is also the kind of thing where once you find yourself in a  
situation where you desperately need it, it may be too late to go  
download the add-on (imagine if ping, traceroute, etc were moved to  
pkgsrc)

Down the road we gain other potential benefits, such as sleep proxy  
support (the core support is in the current release, but it will need  
some fleshing out on NetBSD).

> * How does base directly benefit?

See above, and also consider, how does base benefit from libossaudio?  
OpenLDAP? httpd?

> I didn't see any steps in your list where this integration
> was enabled for other things in base - just a client library,

That comes later. There are a number of possible approaches to this,  
and I'm not yet sure how we'd want to proceed there. I think we may  
want to expirament and see what works for us there. But first we need  
the foundation.

But, really, I think there's a great deal of value before we even get  
to that point. Heck, just the server can be very useful, even with no  
services registered and no nss or client support at all, just to be  
able to find the machine from elsewhere.

> If that's it, I don't really see the integration benefit - those other
> apps can just as well pull this in from pkgsrc at the same time as the
> rest of whatever they need.
>
> If there's more than that, then please show it to fully make a case
> that shows how it integrates with (rather that just adds to) base.


Pretty much anything that we offer that is infrastructure as opposed  
to applications fails that test -- everything from /sbin/ping to X11.