putting HESIOD, Appletalk and IPX on notice

[Robert Watson]

On Fri, 5 Aug 2005, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

> I think it is time we deorbit HESIOD in toto.
>
> At the same time, making Appletalk and IPX "opt in" facilities by 
> putting them under
> 	YES_IPX
> and
> 	YES_APPLETALK
> boolean build options seems a sensible move.
>
> Comments ?
>
> The first RELENG_7 release would happen in 2006 or 2007, there is no way 
> they will need any of those three protocols.

Right now IPX and netatalk are already opt-in for the kernel, as the 
options are already non-default.  I'm not sure we gain anything by doing 
that in user space, other than making it harder to turn them on (since 
presumably we're not talking more than a few hundred k in support code). 
I've found NETIPX and NETATALK both quite useful during the netperf work, 
as they help keep the protocol and socket type abstractions in the stack 
real, as well as explain why things are the way they are.

My leaning would be to leave them as-is until early 2006, then take an 
executive decision then.  Since there's not much point in talking solely 
about the user space parts, I think the decision should be about each 
protocol as a whole (kernel and userspace).  At last today, I know that 
NETIPX is fairly widely used, because we received lots of bug reports when 
5.3 shipped with it broken (as a result of a compiler change, it turns 
out).  As a result, we now have a basic set of IPX and AppleTalk 
regression tests.

I have no opinion on HESIOD, other than that I've always through it 
somewhat fun -- does MIT still deploy it?  If not, then they may have been 
the last major site to do so.  Probably, it would be useful to stuff 
HESIOD in ports since we now support NSS.  I'd like to see us import LDAP 
support into the base system at some point so that we can support cAtive 
Directory integration better.

Robert N M Watson