Do I need avahi?

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Wed, 31 Jul 2013 11:38:00 +0930
Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> Allegedly, on or about 30 July 2013, Olav Vitters sent:
> > Seems unimportant to discuss the difference between not starting up
> > and crashing if you're on about removing avahi and expecting things
> > to still work. 
> 
> I would expect things that actually need avahi to fail, I would expect
> other things that don't need it, to just work.
> 
> I've certainly not used avahi in previous releases, either disabling
> it, or it wasn't there, and my computer ran.  I didn't need, or want
> its services.  In fact, I wanted it not to be able to interfere with
> things. I don't want a computer running things I don't need, and that
> can cause their own set of problems.

You are confusing the avahi library with the avahi daemon. The daemon
doesn't need to run or even be installed for things to work. The
library, however, is a dependency of a large number of packages, and is
needed by the majority of the system, like glibc is.

Of course, you can remove the daemon while keeping the library (the
daemon depends on the library, but not the other way around), so there
should be no problems removing the avahi service itself.

My guess is that Lee probably tried to do something like "yum remove
avahi*" which wanted to remove both the daemon and the library, and
then started complaining endlessly about the daemon. He never even
provided the yum output that he was complaining about.

I see no further point in discussing this thread. The avahi service is
not a dependency on anything serious and you can safely remove it if
you don't want to use it. The avahi libraries (apparently there are at
least two of them, avahi-libs and avahi-glib) are dependencies of
various packages all over the place, and should not be removed, since
they may break a lot of system functionality.

If Lee still sees a dependency problem, he'd better provide the output
of yum demonstrating it, along with the command he used to invoke yum.
Short of that, I see no problem to be discussed any further.

HTH. :-)
Marko