On the no open ports thing, I was very impressed by what avahi's developer had to say on it: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/zeroconf-ubuntu.html He points out that dhcp and dns are likely to have a broader security exposure than mdns. There's also a good point in the comments about CUPS.
The alternative to invluding avahi in the desktop task by default is adding a zeroconf task that enhances other installed tasks, as proposed at http://wiki.debian.org/ZeroConf. There are some plusses and some minuses to that; it's nice the way it allows enhancing even things like the web server task with zeroconf support, but it's problimatic that users are unlikely to say "I want to do zeroconf!", which indicates that it doesn't quite fit as a proper tasksel task. This had fallen off my radar in the past couple of months so I'm glad for this bug report to put it back on. -- see shy jo
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