GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 557740
vinagre-2.24.1 treats avahi as mandatory dependency
Last modified: 2008-11-12 00:13:19 UTC
Vinagre's functionality does not depend on avahi. Avahi should be optional. There should be a compile-time option to toggle the avahi dependency.
Hi. Avahi is an external dependency of GNOME, as you can see at http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointTwentythree/ExternalDependencies. So, every GNOME application can depend on it.
Created attachment 121265 [details] [review] Proposed patch (make avahi optional) Sven E.'s patch (Make avahi optional) This patch adds a --enable-avahi configure switch and does conditional compilation. Re: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243004
(In reply to comment #1) > Hi. Avahi is an external dependency of GNOME, as you can see at > http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointTwentythree/ExternalDependencies. > > So, every GNOME application can depend on it. > I see. That's too bad. This seems like feature bloat to me. It would be nice if use of Avahi were an option left to distribution packagers. Avahi has been optional for a long time. Nothing that's mandatory in Gnome relies upon mDNS/dns-sd capability. There are other forms of name resolution, especially in managed environments. In my opinion, forcing this dependency on users makes Gnome less flexible and limits the range of purposes for which it is useful.
Hi guys, let me reformulate Bonekracker's bug report. This is a feature request to make avahi optional if this is possible. I do not deny the interest of avahi in general, I'm a big fan of it but there is situations in which it is just extra unneeded weight. In the case that was exposed to us on IRC we had people having real worl use with DNS names and perfectly known resources that had no advantage in using avahi and as such don't want to enable it nor to have it on their system. Please reconsider this patch even if it needs some work to ease the maintenance.
Reopening for consideration then. In Gentoo Linux the user could choose if he/she wants avahi support globally or for a specific package, and the distribution doesn't make the choice for him/her but lets them do it themselves, so there is additional value to this, while binary distributions probably would always enable it (which should be the default if the relevant configure option isn't passed)
OK, guys, you won! Just committed your patch [a bit modified]. This will be in for 2.25 (trunk) tough.
Thank you, John.