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

["Jóhann B. Guðmundsson"]

On 03/24/2014 09:22 PM, Peter Robinson wrote:
>>> 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.

I'm not sure where this is coming from but Arch removed this 3 years ago 
and the original request of removal from upstream came from opensuse 
with Debian responding they will be keeping this around for a while ( it 
will be like 4 years in my gestimation for Debian to catch up with 
systemd integration anyway so this is hardly a pressing concern for them 
) so Lennart was being rather conservative of it's removal upstream 
atleast not without checking with us ( Fedora ) first since we were the 
remaining part responding of the "big distro's" to his "heads up" .

 From broader view this boils down to how long should unmaintained core 
os components be kept around, which is something that should be hashed 
out among relevant upstreams in next plumbers session to establish a 
clear path forward and arguably upstreams should be responsible to make 
the decisions when things should be deprecated forcing downstream to 
either adapt new modern way's or maintain stuff downstream with 
themselves chose they do so instead of adapt.

By the way the kernel does not have a proper deprecation process which 
is accurately reflected in all the code that is bit-rotting there so 
it's not the holy grail of code maintenance as you let it out to be.

It lacks it's Boothby's to snip out the dead branches as much as we do 
here with us.

JBG