Do I need avahi?

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Sun, 28 Jul 2013 00:58:24 +0200
lee <lee at yun.yagibdah.de> wrote:

> Timothy Murphy <gayleard at alice.it> writes:
> 
> > But my real query is whether avahi (or zeroconf)
> > could actually offer me anything useful.
> 
> Hmm I disabled it now and will see what happens.  There are 224
> packages depending on the avahi package --- that's insane for
> something that isn't needed.
> 
> Why are there so many packages depending on it?

Not on my system (F18/64bit/KDE), there are only 22 of them depending
on avahi, and most of them are just wine-related. If I didn't need wine
or nss-mdns, I could remove it no problem:

Removing:
 avahi   x86_64   0.6.31-6.fc18   @fedora   1.0 M
Removing for dependencies:
mingw32-wine-gecko
mingw64-wine-gecko
nss-mdns
nss-mdns
wine-alsa
wine-capi
wine-capi
wine-cms
wine-cms
wine-common
wine-core
wine-core
wine-desktop
wine-ldap
wine-ldap
wine-openal
wine-openal
wine-pulseaudio
wine-pulseaudio
wine-twain
wine-twain
wine-wow

Transaction Summary
=============================================================================================================================================================
Remove  1 Package (+22 Dependent packages)


So it's just nss-mdns and wine & friends.

OTOH, if you are running, say, Gnome3 or such, then you should ask the
relevant developers on the relevant mailing list why oh why do they
depend on avahi so much. ;-)

HTH, :-)
Marko