[avahi] proposal for avahi service configuration directory change

[Lennart Poettering]

On Fri, 28.09.07 12:00, Jason Whitlark (jwhitlark-avahi-ml at zentek.com) wrote:

Hi!

Sorry for not responding earlier.

> With regards to /etc/avahi/services, I propose we move to the apache
> 2 style of service configuration, i.e.  services-available and
> services-enabled directories with symlinks from the latter to the
> former.  This would have three
> benefits that I can see:
> 
> 1) Easily enable/disable services, particularly through 3rd party applications.
> 2) Management of services would be obvious.
> 3) Allows us to ship sample configurations, allowing people to be productive with avahi much faster and increasing adoption.

Quite frankly I am not a big fan of symlink farms like that. But more
importantly I believe that Avahi is about zeroconf, and hence the
administrator shouldn't need to do much configuration. Instead, every
package like ssh should just stick its service file into the right
dir and good. If people don't want Avahi support then they're welcome
to disable it -- but please altogether. Fine grained support for
enabling and disabling specific static files would be
counterproductive. Last but not least static service definitions files
are a bit of hack, something like an easy way to get daemons that
don't support Avahi directly on the zeroconf train. Ideally all
software would come with Avahi support built in. Some software (like
SSH) very likely never will, and this might even be a good thing, but
only for those few cases I implemented static service file support
in the first place.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
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