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

[Peter Robinson]

>> 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)...

Interesting! You sent the email starting this thread a mere 4 days
ago, two of those a weekend. You've not given it a chance to even go
to FESCo meeting for discussion. Did you send it in the same way to
the rest of the distros that depend, or are soon to depend on, systemd
now.... SuSE, Arch, Debian, Ubuntu etc giving them no chance to
discuss the impact before you unceremoniously tear a feature, for
some, out?

Ultimately I've long stopped using tcpwrappers (a decade or so ago in
fact) so it doesn't bother me what so ever but I know of a LOT of
people that use it, rightly or wrongly, extensively.

systemd is now, or soon will be, a core component of pretty much all
major and minor distributions out there and it's no longer just about
you Lennart and your thoughts of whether it's "Yuck!" or not, you are
now similar to the kernel and like the kernel you should have a proper
deprecation process that is not just what you, Kay and who ever the
main developers decide is cool or not at the time. You should give us
and distributions in general more than 4 days to deal with what lives
or not. Ultimately systemd is no longer in nappies and is all grown
up, while you are still it's father it's now a teenager and needs to
be somewhat independent of it's father, it has friends that now depend
on it and there's should be a central place where these architectural
changes and deprecation intentions are announced, discussed and in the
case of deprecation given more than 4 days before removal.

Peter