Maybe it's time to get rid of tcpwrappers/tcpd?

[Lennart Poettering]

On Thu, 20.03.14 18:34, Lennart Poettering (mzerqung at 0pointer.de) wrote:

> Heya!
> 
> I wonder whether it wouldn't be time to say goodbye to tcpwrappers in
> Fedora. There has been a request in systemd upstream to disable support
> for it by default, but I am not sure I want to do that unless we can
> maybe say goodbye to it for the big picture too.

I have decided now to drop all support for tcpwrap from systemd, for the
next release. For those who believe that tcpd is really a good idea
(yuck!) not much is lost though, they can just plug in tcpd into
systemd, the way they did it with good old inetd, too, hence we are not
taking anything away there, we are pretty much compatible with what
inetd supported there (or actually: didn't support there).

I am not going to file a feature for Fedora, to remove support for it
entirely across the whole distro. I still think dropping it is the right
thing to do, but I don't think it's a good use of my own time, to fight
this through... I'd be happy though if somebody else would pick this
up. Looking at the current FESCO members I am not entirely sure though
whether a proposal to disable libwrap would have a chance in the current
cycle though. (also, M. Miller kinda supported the proposal, which as
history tells us means he probably is _not_ going to vote for it in the
end...)

It's a pity though that nobody in Fedora is actively working on getting
rid of legacy cruft. I really wished we had some people who oversee
deprecating things more proactively, figure out how to deprecate things,
write stub code to provide smooth transitions, write release notes and
so on. Being at the bleeding edge of things also means deciding that
some things really should go, from time to time... Besides deprecating
old cruft like libwrap, this would also mean removing all the old crap
from comps "standard" that we still install by default (894110)...

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat