Hi Michael, On Sun, May 08, 2022 at 11:24:12AM -0400, Michael Stone wrote: > So what's the path forward, maintaining compatibility and not breaking > systems upgrading from current stable? Do we come up with a dhcpcd5 variant > that *only* touches interfaces it is directed to touch via > /etc/network/interfaces? Do we add udhcpcd to the "dhcp-client" virtual > package and/or make it the default for ifupdown? Do we fork isc's dhcp suite > and just continue to use dhclient? Revive pump? Something else?
I use some very customized dhclient hook scripts that I don't want to give up so I've been concerned about this situation ever since the EOM announcment myself. Certainly I don't want it (or at least dhclient) to be removed from Debian. The problem is all of the other dhcp clients that have scripting support also have problematic maintainance situations. For example dhcpcd's maintainer has serious health problems and is looking for someone to take over (no one has AFAICT), dribbler (used to be in Debian IIRC) is "concluded" and that's pretty much it for non v6-only dhcp clients you can script. On the v6 end wide-dhcpv6 doesn't look to fresh either though. I've tried reaching out to ISC a while ago to see what our options are in terms of perhaps keeping the code upstream but disabling it there so we can keep maintaining it in Debian. Unfortunately they are not interested in doing that. However they would be open to pointing people to a project to keep dhclient/relay alive in their release notes. So I've been thinking about setting up at least a mailing-list to gather people interested in seeing this happen since I don't think I'll be able to have time to do it all by myself. --Daniel
